John Lothrop Motley Quotations

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.

With the Germans, the sovereignty resided in the great assembly of the people.

Thus the liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger.

Thus again the Netherlands, for the first time since the fall of Rome, were united under one crown imperial. They had already been once united, in their slavery to Rome.

The whole territory of the Netherlands was girt with forests.

The rise of the Dutch Republic must ever be regarded as one of the leading events of modern times.

The sword - the first, for a time the only force: the force of iron.

The gigantic Gaul derided the Roman soldiers as a band of pigmies.

To the Calvinists, more than to any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England, and America are due.

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career.

Wealth brings strength, strength confidence.

Thus the whole country was broken into many shreds and patches of sovereignty.

A terrible animal, indeed, is an unbridled woman.

The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons into servitude.

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessities.

Monuments! what are they? the very pyramids have forgotten their builders, or to whom they were dedicated. Deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great.

Local self-government…is the life-blood of liberty.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

In Gaul were two orders, the nobility and the priesthood, while the people, says Caesar, were all slaves.

The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the Netherlands.

When did one man ever civilize a people?

A talent for repartee is one that increases with practice.

The splendid empire of Charles the Fifth was erected upon the grave of liberty.

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

History shows how feeble are barriers of paper.

Enthusiasm could not supply the place of experience.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

A good lawyer is a bad Christian.

A third force, developing itself more slowly, becomes even more potent than the rest: the power of gold.