Quotes from Christopher Hill

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.

History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.

The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?

Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.

The child is father to the man" is a Romantic riddle that turns worldly hierarchy on its head. It means that the child is in some sense the superior of the man; the child is wiser than the man. Ironically, the eventual broad acceptance of this truth did not so much liberate the Victorian bourgeois as it haunted them and gave them a bad conscience. They sensed that the poets were right.

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

In the fifteenth century the mere fact of owning and reading the Bible in English was presumptive evidence of heresy.

Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity...Peace is their ruin,...by war they are enriched...Peace is their war, peace is their poverty.

Our holy prelates [say that God's Word] causeth insurrection and teacheth the people to disobey...and moveth them to rise against their princes, and to make all common, and to make havoc of other men's goods. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man