By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.
He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION.
Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.
No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.
So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient.
It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, no epoch was more naturally mad.
John Quincy Adams' dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, there will be America's heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
At Coucy's level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out—to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet hall.
The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
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 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.
House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.
Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end death is seen seated on the face.
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
He was always the bridge, between men as well as between ideas.
Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy.
Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.
In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.
Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions, and Michel duly paid for his clairvoyance.
Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events. No.
But to settle the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli's power—beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today.
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.
THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland.
Sternly saving his greatest strength for the right wing, he did not yield to that vaulting ambition in his plan. But the lure of the left wing remained to tempt his successors.
Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed.
The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal.
Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal's obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay.
A regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king, who soon came to regard it as a right.
They were twelve days in which world history wavered between two courses and the Germans came so close to victory that they reached out and touched it between the Aisne and the Marne.
Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening; and compline at bedtime.
Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it.
Two firing squads marched to the center of the square, faced either way and fired till no more of the targets stood upright. Six hundred and twelve bodies were identified and buried, including Felix Fivet, aged three weeks.
But once divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith.
Those deterrents—the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors—which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People.
He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.
To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.
It was one of the peculiar malfunctions of technology that shore batteries on the islands were generally of inadequate caliber and range to knock out a ship approaching with hostile intent. One is moved to wonder why, if a 10-pounder gun could be mounted on the rolling deck of a sailing vessel, the same or larger could not be mounted on land?
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn't responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.
What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?
Fear of God is thrown away, lamented Brigitta in Rome, and in its place is a bottomless bag of money. All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: Bring hither the money.
Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority.
Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.
