“Ancient families became extinct and the Church became the heir of their lands and slaves and serfs.”

— Walter Rauschenbusch

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 144
Context: When the machinery of [Roman] imperial administration broke down in the provinces under the invasion of the barbarians in the fifth century the machinery of the Church remained unbroken.... Ancient families became extinct and the Church became the heir of their lands and slaves and serfs. Small proprietors sought security by committing their lands to the Church and becoming its tenants.

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Walter Rauschenbusch83

United States Baptist theologian 1861–1918

Oscar Levy (1867–1946) German physician and writer

Source: The Revival of Aristocracy (1906), p. 39.

“Curiously enough, and this is what his family could not understand, the more religious he became the less he could tolerate the churches.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Description of Nicholas in Tolstoy's "The Light Shines in Darkness."
Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 43

“The Arabs had acquired Africans as slaves for centuries, but they were exploited in a feudal context. African slaves in Arab hands became domestics, soldiers, and agricultural serfs. Whatever surplus they produced was not for reinvestment and multiplication of capital, as in the West Indian or North American slave systems but for consumption by the feudal elite. Indeed, slaves were often maintained more for social prestige than for economic benefit.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 225.

“Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“Dinosaurs, Neanderthals, and Denisovans did not evolve and adapt fast enough, and therefore they became extinct. Modus operandi or business as usual will doom the human race to mass extinction.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

As quoted by Arthur C. Clarke in "Meeting of the Minds : Buzz Aldrin Visits Arthur C. Clarke" by Andrew Chaikin (27 February 2001) http://web.archive.org/web/20010302082528/http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/aldrin_clarke_010227.html

“What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one’s self became reluctance to assert one’s self, became forgiveness, love of one’s enemies. Misery became a distinction”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 31-32

“Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 41.
Collected Works

“It became a fashion to raid a village or group of villages without any obvious justification, and carry off the inhabitants as slaves.”

William Harrison Moreland (1868–1938) British civil servant in India and historian

W.H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, also quoted in Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 6

“The landed wealth of the Church alone sufficed to make it a power of the highest rank in the feudal system of the Middle Ages, in which all power finally rested on the possession of the land. Bishops and abbots became feudal dignitaries, sometimes almost sovereign princes in their own domains, and always with a potent voice in the government of their nations.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 144

“Ancient families became extinct and the Church became the heir of their lands and slaves and serfs.”

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Walter Rauschenbusch83

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