Medieval Quotations

My first published novel was 'Mother of Demons,' which is simply 'The High Crusade' standing on its head. Poul Anderson placed his medieval human heroes in a futuristic alien setting; I placed my futuristic human heroes in a bronze age alien setting.

We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.

There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does.

In middle school, I was really into the 'Redwall' series, about anthropomorphic rodents in medieval times. I had a bowl cut, too, if you need the full imagery.

Amplifying atoms is more subtle than amplifying electromagnetic waves because atoms can only change their quantum state and cannot be created. Therefore, even if one could amplify gold atoms, one would not realize the dreams of medieval alchemy.

I went and looked at one of these great cathedrals one day, and I was blown away by it. From there I became interested in how cathedrals were built, and from there I became interested in the society that built the medieval cathedral. It occurred to me at some point that the story of the building of a cathedral could be a great popular novel.

We had extremely democratic town councils in medieval Italy which knew the value of working together, and every now and then, down the centuries, this spirit returns.

But no, I don't think I'm particularly drawn to the period roles or the medieval roles.

We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: 'You won't believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.'

If I can't face my accusers, that's a joke. We did that in medieval times.

The costumes are insane on 'Once Upon a Time.' It did influence my taking the job, the fact that not only would I be horseback riding and sword fighting and traipsing through the woods but I would be doing all those things in insane, medieval garb.

In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like.

My concern is to keep religion and the state separated. I don't think that religion and politics go together. When you see political decisions colored by religion, decisions that affect us all... I thought: 'I do not want to go back to medieval times.'

There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.

When you look at the original 'Paradise Lost' film, you see three kids who can't defend themselves, being persecuted in a medieval way - witchcraft, satanic worship. It was kind of primitive.

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?

When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research 'Here Be Dragons,' I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.

The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.

So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.

Medieval 2: Total War is the result of seven years continuous development of the Total War series and has been designed to appeal to all gamers, not just hardcore strategy fans. Each game in the series has outshone the previous one and Medieval 2: Total War is no exception.

Medieval 2: Total War is the result of 7 years continuous development of the Total War series and has been designed to appeal to all gamers, not just hardcore strategy fans, Each game in the series has outshone the previous one and Medieval 2: Total War is no exception.

My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.

From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.

I was just a ham since about the age of five. If I was performing at Medieval Times or something, I'd be the court jester. That was always my defense mechanism. I was never all that funny; I was just obnoxious and loud.

I think it's the only completely American sport that there is. Most of the team sports are a variation on the old medieval tournaments, but stock car racing is so American. It's astounding to me how many people are interested in stock car racing.

People like me who believe the left can be a moderate forcewe have failed. We are stuck in the medieval notion that there is an aristocracy and a people, and the people want a piece of what the aristocracy hada life subsidized enough to have a minimum of work and a maximum of pleasure.

Marketing is not bragging, and touting one's wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler, 'Fresh rolls!' if he hopes to feed the townfolk.

Like medieval peasants, computer manufacturers and millions of users are locked in a seemingly eternal lease with their evil landlord, who comes around every two years to collect billions of dollars of taxes in return for mediocre services

I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.

I was traumatised in the medieval Afghan society at Sarana village by the local boys of Omar's Taliban who forced my in-laws to subjugate me for trying to be different. There can be Omars in other religions, too, who oppress women.

I was born on September 30, 1939, in Rosheim, a small medieval city of Alsace in France. My father, Pierre Lehn, then a baker, was very interested in music, played the piano and the organ, and became, later, having given up the bakery, the organist of the city. My mother Marie kept the house and the shop.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

The ascetism of early Christianity, which turned its back on the world of the flesh, had degrenerated, in some quarters of the Church, into hatred of those who those who brought that flesh into being. Misogyny, the hatred of women, had become a strong element in medieval Christianity. Women who menstruate, and give birth, were identified with sexuality and therefore with evil. "All witchcraft stems from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable," stated the Malleus Maleficarum.

I was mesmerized by what it would be like for somebody who was a student of history and archeology to go back to a medieval period and really live it.

Those are hard films to make, medieval films. Nobody will put a lot of cash into it, but it needs a lot of money because of sets and costumes and stuff. I really, really wanted to make that film just because I knew it would be a big challenge, and I also knew that I wanted to create a world that was my world and it wasn't a world based on what we all know.

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

This was unimaginable to me, that one could actually have a great time making a film, that it could be a blast despite the medieval solemnity.

Each game in the series has outshone the previous one and Medieval 2: Total War is no exception.

Is there, as the medieval mystics taught, a "spark" at the core of the Soul, which never consents to evil, a Divine nucleus in the heart of the personality, which can take no stain?

I've come off horses and fought in medieval battles using axes, hammers and swords as well as fists. Getting your teeth knocked out is an occupational hazard.

The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too.

Sometimes, in our thinking about higher education, we're too narrowly confined to a utilitarian calculus about what it's doing to the bottom line of UK plc. I wanted to make the point that higher education adds immeasurably to the value of the UK economy without necessarily obliging everybody to pursue courses that have some immediate vocational application. I wanted to stick up for medieval history, among other things, which was deprecated by Charles Clarke.

Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.

Say you have cancer - you have this broad thing we call cancer; we're going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level.

Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn't come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they're totally cutting loose.

Although the new building has been designed to leave the deeper Roman and early medieval deposits intact... it is providing an exciting opportunity to examine an unusually large area of important late medieval and post-medieval remains.

A major rugby tour by the British Isles to New Zealand is a cross between a medieval crusade and a prep school outing.

About the process of growing up .. What follows is tragic. We stop risking for fear of making mistakes, fear of not fitting in, fear of being embarrassed or humiliated by saying the 'wrong' thing. Our instinctive joy and boundless enthusiasm are replaced by playing it safe and looking good. Our spontaneity deserts us, and with it much of our natural creativity. Predictability replaces passion. We learn to reveal very little of who we really are and what we really feel. We sell the richness of our passionate birthright for the security of this burdensome thing called our image. It weighs us down like a suit of medieval armor, restricting our every move, sapping our vitality and aliveness. We wander through life on automatic pilot, controlled by the need to live up to the false image that we invented.

It's a very beautiful country and it has some of the Arab world's most interesting, best preserved, medieval ruins. And it's also got a living culture which is exotic in the true sense of the word,

It's like trying to read some of the writing in medieval manuscripts or handwriting from the 1500s. Even though it is our same writing system we don't recognize it.

It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.

The world is expecting us to make poverty history ? to turn poverty into something our great grandchildren will read about, but not really understand, like the medieval plagues, ... We can do it. And we must do it.

In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as 'filling in the blanks.' Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.

In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.

In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.

Because a given era lacked a given body of information, we feel that its whole consciousness was naive. We can, therefore, sniff at, say, twelfth-century imagery of evil along with twelfth-century notions as to the shape of the solar system. The idea is that, having come upon information that supervenes the medieval cosmology, we can thereby dismiss all medieval notions as merely medieval.

I've always been interested in a lot of the medieval art portraying people being tormented.

'Game of Thrones' is a fantasy show not dedicated to any specific time, but it seems to exist in sort of a 1400s medieval fantasy world, and in that setting, I wouldn't have had a six-pack.

I listen to a lot of medieval music.

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

I'm sure you can even find ménage à trois in medieval tales.

Airports and 'leg room' on planes are a form of medieval torture.

The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.

Religion is such a medieval idea. Don't get me started. I have thought about every facet of religion, and I can't buy any of it.

In medieval times, artists had patrons that supported them and this is a similar thing, ... We're basically saying, 'Wouldn't you like to be a part of this'

We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us.

To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

These are barbaric people [at ISIS]. These are people that - you know, I used to study medieval times, and you know, they chopped off heads. But until recently, this was a phenomena that you wouldn't see, the level of barbarism is unbelievable.