“The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.”

—  Harold Innis

Industrialism and Cultural Values p. 139.
The Bias of Communication (1951)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 6, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs." by Harold Innis?
Harold Innis photo
Harold Innis 22
Canadian professor of political economy 1894–1952

Related quotes

Jackson Pollock photo

“It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique…”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 17

“The bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence. Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Three, The Testimony Of Modern Art, p. 57

H.L. Mencken photo

“It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.”

H.L. Mencken book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908/1913)
1900s

Sigmund Freud photo

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779
1930s

L. Ron Hubbard photo

“Scientology is the only specific (cure) for radiation (atomic bomb) burns.”

L. Ron Hubbard book All About Radiation

All About Radiation (1952) p. 109.

Charles Krauthammer photo

“In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today’s shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

"The Return of the Primitive" http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984031,00.html, TIME magazine (29 January 1996)
1990s, 1996

“The unity of the Middle Ages as a historical period is quite artificial. In reality they fall into three entirely distinct cultural periods—the natural economy of the early Middle Ages; the courtly chivalry of the high Middle Ages; and the urban bourgeois culture of the late Middle Ages. At any rate, the divisions between these three epochs go deeper than those which mark the beginning and the end of the Middle Ages as a whole.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages

Paul Tillich photo

“At the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p.57

“In the Middle Ages the king offered protection to his subjects in return for their loyalty, and the subjects were doubly protected, for the church also sheltered them. The need for shelter - for a father image that cares and will hopefully provide and give some meaning to human lives - remains as real as it was in the Middle Ages, but modern technocracy has no place for either the father or the church and provides no substitute.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

A Vision of the Uncorrupted Society, p. 292 ( See also: Social contract..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

Hans Blix photo

“But in the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them.”

Hans Blix (1928) Swedish politician

BBC News, "Blix criticises UK's Iraq dossier", September 18, 2003 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3118462.stm
referring to the British and American governments' insistence that there are WMD in Iraq after Blix had already concluded and reported there was nothing to be found

Related topics