The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.
The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity.
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.
God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.