Top 35 Tom Holland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.”

— Tom Holland

2. “True strength manifested itself not in the exercise of power, but in the willingness to give it up. So Tolkien, as a Christian, believed. It was why, in the last year of.”

— Tom Holland

3. “The dull mind rises to the truth through material.”

— Tom Holland

4. “The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether.”

— Tom Holland

5. “Of all Rome’s seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.”

— Tom Holland

6. “The concept of natural law had no place in Torah. Yet Paul – as he struggled to define the law that he believed, in the wake of the crucifixion and the resurrection, to be written on the heart of all who acknowledged Christ as Lord – did not hesitate to adapt the teachings of the Greeks. The word he used for it – syneidesis – clearly signalled which philosophers in particular he had in mind. Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.”

— Tom Holland

7. “Just like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favors sweat.”

— Tom Holland

8. “The ‘ulama’, by tightly controlling what went into the history books, were able to propagate an understanding of their own dazzlingly rich and complex civilization that attributed almost every single thing of value within it to the Prophet, and the Prophet alone. There was no question of acknowledging the momentous roles played in the forging of Islam by countless others – be they autocrats such as Abd Al-Malik or scholars such as themselves.”

— Tom Holland

9. “Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar: the last Jewish king ever to rule in Arabia.”

— Tom Holland

10. “Winners are the favourites of heaven.”

— Tom Holland

11. “Another woman, “whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,”2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.”

— Tom Holland

12. “JULIA: Oldest daughter of Julia and Agrippa. Owner of the smallest dwarf in Rome. Exiled in AD 8.”

— Tom Holland

13. “The news, when it leaked out, caused outrage and horror in Rome. The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.”

— Tom Holland

14. “In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61.”

— Tom Holland

15. “The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility’s dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity.”

— Tom Holland

16. “Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. ‘To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland.”

— Tom Holland

17. “Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself.”

— Tom Holland

18. “We always want what we’re not allowed.”

— Tom Holland

19. “The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic.”

— Tom Holland

20. “Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans.”

— Tom Holland

21. “As one Saudi professor sternly tells his co-religionists, “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.”

— Tom Holland

22. “It was as though the problems of the Republic bored the man appointed to solve them, as though Rome herself were now too small a stage for his ambitions.”

— Tom Holland

23. “The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance.”

— Tom Holland

24. “Only centuries after the death of Jesus – by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ – did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists.”

— Tom Holland

25. “The unspeakable rituals of the heathen, who might think nothing of sacrificing a horse and then making sport with its phallus, were echoed in grim tales of Christian women transforming themselves into equine form, and revelling in the bestial.”

— Tom Holland

26. “Never before had Jewish morality and Greek philosophy been fused to such momentous effect. That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics – and yet equally was foreign to them both.”

— Tom Holland

27. “Harmony enables small things to flourish – while the lack of it destroys the great.”

— Tom Holland

28. “Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous.”

— Tom Holland

29. “Only a few prefer liberty – the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories.”

— Tom Holland

30. “While he may forget that he is Caesar, I never forget that I am Caesar’s daughter.”

— Tom Holland

31. “History, unlike faith, cannot be built upon foundations of sand.”

— Tom Holland

32. “Time erodes both steel and stone.’ So Ovid had written in the months before his death.”

— Tom Holland

33. “So highly did the Roman people prize this ideal of the common good that their name for it – res publica – served as shorthand for their entire system of government.”

— Tom Holland

34. “One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants’ diaries.”

— Tom Holland

35. “Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.”

— Tom Holland