John Edward Christopher Hill

“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.”

“Religion was the idiom in which the men of the seventeenth century thought.”

“The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords.”

“Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.”

“For a brief period, it seemed that the world might be turned upside down.”

“Men did not know what they were doing. But they did what they did.”

“The Protestant ethic, the spirit of capitalism, was the ideology of a militant minority of the godly who felt themselves to be aliens in their own country.”

“The Bible was the single most powerful formative influence on the minds of Englishmen.”

“The common people... had their own culture, their own values, which the rulers of society could not altogether destroy.”

“The idea of a 'career open to the talents' was a revolutionary slogan.”

“The historian's task is not to be a judge, but to be an explainer.”

“Divine right of kings was a myth created to justify the absolutism of the monarchy.”

“Freedom of the press, so valued in our own society, was a product of the Revolution.”