“About 1500 it seemed as if Europe was about to cast off at one effort the slough of feudal barbarism, and to step at once into the fair inheritance of the wisdom and culture of the ancient world. The Church led the van, and smiled on free inquiry and the new learning. About the third decennium of the century the resistance of the obscurantists was organised, the Catholic reaction set in, and nascent humanism was submerged beneath the rising tide of theological passion and the fatal and fruitless controversies of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, to the rival cries of the Bible and the Church. The " sacrificio d'intelletto " of Loyola took the place of the free and rationalising spirit with which Erasmus had looked out upon the world of men.”

Interview on Talk of the Nation (NPR) as quoted in &quot;NPR Interview with 300’s Frank Miller&quot; The Atlasphere (10 March 2007) http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/612.php <br class="br">Context: For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

Address to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference in Nadi, 8 September 2005

Vanderbilt Commencement Address (2011)

Source: Distant Shores

Source: Honey Moon (1990), p. 120

Source: Seeking the pearl of great price https://mercatornet.com/seeking_the_pearl_of_great_price/8854/ (October 22, 2009)

Christopher Hitchens, Mel Gibson Isn't Just an Angry Narcissist: His tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of right-wing Catholic ideology., Slate, July. 19, 2010

Source: The Story of Art (1978), p. 33.