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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b11809f | It is worth noting the qualities this historian ascribes to them: they were fearless, high-principled, deeply versed in ancient and modern political thought, astute and pragmatic, unafraid of experiment, and--this is significant--"convinced of man's power to improve his condition through the use of intelligence." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 579562f | the symbolism of the Garter, a circlet to bind the Knight-Companions mutually, and all of them jointly to the King as head of the Order. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 5e1fdf8 | 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. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 6b5c48d | Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statute of Laborers. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 992c2b9 | Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French, | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| cae51ef | Can the military art be learned in the games and hunts in which you pass your youth?" The" | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 83a3f88 | Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 066c872 | These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| d5080d0 | 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." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| d58eb40 | principle, formulated for the occasion, that "a woman does not succeed to the throne of France." Thus was born the momentous Salic "Law" that was to create a permanent bar to the succession of women where none had existed before." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 0edf4fc | Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been "seduced by that liar, the Devil," and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres were a "horrible thing." He pointed out that "by a mysterious decree of God" the plague was afflicting all peoples, including Jews; that it raged in places where no Jews lived, and that elsewhere they were victims like everyone else; therefore t.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 5491aa6 | Melancholy, amorous and barbaric," these tales exalted adulterous love as the only true kind, while in the real life of the same society adultery was a crime, not to mention a sin. If found out, it dishonored the lady and shamed the husband, a fellow knight. It was understood that he had the right to kill both unfaithful wife and lover. Nothing fits in this canon. The gay, the elevating, the ennobling pursuit is founded upon sin and invites.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 6e97e2c | History never repeats itself," said Voltaire; "man always does." Thucydides," | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| a520920 | In the woe of the century no factor caused more trouble than the persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of state financing. While centralized government was developing, taxation was still encased in the concept that taxes represented an emergency measure requiring consent. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 96b6d3d | A terrible worm in an iron cocoon," as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse's backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| c677b29 | Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 2c7d719 | That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 7352456 | the plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| fb42262 | Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 4ca4766 | 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. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 3ac5ba3 | That the mortality was accepted as God's punishment may explain in part the vacuum of comment that followed the Black Death. An investigator has noticed that in the archives of Perigord references to the war are innumerable, to the plague few. Froissart mentions the great death but once, Chaucer gives it barely a glance. Divine anger so great that it contemplated the extermination of man did not bear close examination. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| c16d9af | Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 300139f | Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable. | realism strategy | Barbara W. Tuchman | |
| dbee9b1 | What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 389a8bf | Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 0585c42 | Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION. | overreaction persuasion statesmanship | Barbara W. Tuchman | |
| 36297b6 | Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God's purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God's work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorin.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 9fcaadc | The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| dcba8a1 | He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 054f14a | Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on. * | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 0a06030 | Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would've taken the most intelligent man five or six hours--that is, five minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot... | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| a8e210b | She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| ae8e794 | She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever. | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 3f97188 | government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits. | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 8231beb | Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by asking directions, | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| a2dacfd | There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better. | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 5830eef | The Reverend Elmer Gantry was reading an illustrated pink periodical devoted to prize fighters and chorus girls in his room at Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall late of an afternoon when two large men walked in without knocking. "Why, good evening, Brother Bains--Brother Naylor! This is a pleasant surprise. I was, uh-- Did you ever see this horrible rag? About actoresses. An invention of the devil himself. I was thinking of denouncing it next Sunda.. | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 8d86507 | Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war." -- | generations politics social-good society voting war young-people | Sinclair Lewis | |
| 76fcea3 | Oh, quit it! You're the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria. | race society | Sinclair Lewis | |
| 0dcd21a | The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it! | rumors society | Sinclair Lewis | |
| 13dd2ca | Well, he'd get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He'd take the first text he turned to and talk on that. He opened on: 'Now THEREFORE, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, which ARE beyond the river, be ye far from thence,' an injunction spirited but not at present helpful. | sermon-writing | Sinclair Lewis | |
| c5587d2 | Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere--not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs! | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 36228fc | She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt--without answering it." | Sinclair Lewis | ||
| 25bc280 | It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it! | Sinclair Lewis |