Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.
If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.
When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.
[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard
Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.
Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.
We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.
That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.
bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.
The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.
Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.
Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.