Spain

David Landes - Iberia particularly wanted for enterprise and skills, including the ability to read. These failings went back centuries -- to religious zealotry and Counter-Reformation cultivation of ignorance -- and rules out the kind of diversification that would have compensated for agricultural infertility and poverty. Comparative literacy rates are not exact, in large part because definitions and judgments varied from one country to another. Even so, the contrast between Mediterranean and northern Europe is undeniably large. Around 1900, for example, when only 3 percent of Great Britain was illiterate, the figure for Italy was 48 percent, for Spain 56 percent, for Portugal 78 percent. The religious persecutions of old -- the massacres, hunts, expulsions, forced conversions, and self-imposed intellectual closure, proved to be a kind of original sin. Their effects would not wear off until the twentieth century ... and not always even then. (Needless to say, this indictment has not been to the taste of Spanish elites, political and intellectual. No one likes to be told [reminded] that his failures are due to his failings; or that his sources of pride are vices rather than virtue.

Miguel de Unamuno - Tous les Espagnols suivent le prêtre. Les uns avec un crucifix, les autres avec un gourdin.