Medieval Quotes - Page 3

• Your mind is your spirit; do not seek any other hidden soul inside you! All is in the brain! The depiction of a spirit rising to the sky is no more real than a medieval Scandinavian fairytales!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Real, Sky, Soul

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• Now the Thanksgiving meal is just so unnecessarily difficult. I mean even mashed potatoes - it's like the most difficult kind of, you know, medieval idea. All right, instead of just cooking them, why don't you spend, like, eight hours peeling them and then we'll have to mash them up. It feels like prison labor, really.

  Jim Gaffigan

  Mean, Eight, Ideas

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Nowadays, by contrast, Christianity specialises in soft-focus mood music; its threats of hell, its demand for poverty and chastity, its doctrine that only the few will be saved and the many damned, have been shed, replaced by strummed guitars and saccharine smiles. It has reinvented itself so often, and with such breathtaking hypocrisy, in the interests of retaining its hold on the gullible, that a medieval monk who woke today, like Woody Allen's Sleeper, would not be able to recognise the faith that bears the same name as his own.

  A.C. Grayling

  Guitar, Names, Hypocrisy

  "Can an atheist be a fundamentalist?" by A. C. Grayling, www.theguardian.com. May 3, 2006.

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• In medieval Europe, childbirth was a leading cause of death. So widowed fathers with children were quite common, meaning stepmothers were equally common.

  Robert Paul Weston

  Children, Father, Europe

  Source: www.yabookshelf.com

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• If we study learning as a data science, we can reverse engineer the human brain and tailor learning techniques to maximize the chances of student success. This is the biggest revolution that could happen in education, turning it into a data-driven science, and not such a medieval set of rumors professors tend to carry on.

  Sebastian Thrun

  Data, Brain, Rumor

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• If you have an area where high-income receivers concentrate, you have a higher fiscal capacity. That fiscal capacity is a valuable resource and will create rent-seeking. People will trying to get that resource one way or the other, including immigration. It is very much like the medieval peasants putting their sheep on the commons pasture. It is better than the open range, and if you let them have open access they will, in fact, put too many sheep on the pasture and waste the value that the pasture has.

  James M. Buchanan

  Past, Sheep, People

  Source: www.aims.ca

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

  E. O. Wilson

  Technology, Emotion, Institutions

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

  Richard Rogers

  Florence, Building, Contrast

  "Interview: architects Richard Rogers, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour". Interview with Charlotte Higgins, www.theguardian.com. January 27, 2012.

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• While I was drawn to the Renaissance, my first (unpublished) novels took place in modern times. When the subject of alchemy started creeping into my stories, an astute mentor observed that the bits about alchemy might fit better in another time frame. When I finally decided to weave the pieces about the medieval science into historical settings, a successful novel began to emerge. (And I dusted off that art history book, and put it to use once again.)

  Mary Pope Osborne

  Art, Book, Successful

  Source: www.yabookshelf.com

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• Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion... The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.

  J. William Fulbright

  Lying, Philosophy, Reality

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• Now, as at the beginning of the 19th century, there is a certain discovery of Eckhart and related figures. There are questions as to how far our Eckhart accords with the real medieval teacher of that name, but there are certainly images in his work that help us work our way past several of the aporia with which we're confronted in our attempts to think about God.

  George Pattison

  Teacher, Real, Past

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in sixteenth-century Spain, which is already going through secularization, industrialization, modernization. He goes out to kill a giant, and instead he collides with this huge windmill and injures himself and also damages the windmill. I think that's a metaphor for the collisions we all have over time, as our ideas of ourselves get out of synch with the historical moment.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, Ideas, Guy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Phyllis Diller

  Ideas, Facets, I Can

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• Consumerism has become a new religion, complete with its high priests at Which? and its fatwas against anyone with the temerity to try to sell anything at more than cost price ... It is a depressingly medieval outlook on economic life.

  Sean O'Grady

  Trying, Cost, Economic

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• To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision.

  James Randi

  Laughter, Book, Character

  Skeptic Magazine, Volume 3, No. 4, 1995.

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• The American Heritage Dictionary defines crucible as "a place, time, or situation characterized by the confluence of powerful intellectual, social, economic, or political forces; a severe test of patience or belief; a vessel for melting material at high temperatures." A crucible was the vessel in which medieval alchemists attempted to turn base metals into gold. That the alchemists inevitably failed in their audacious attempts doesn't denigrate the power of the crucible as a metaphor for the circumstances that cause an individual to be utterly transformed.

  Warren G. Bennis

  Powerful, Political, Crucible

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• The war in Afghanistan was fought for feminist reasons, and the Marines were really on this feminist mission. But today, all the women in all these countries have been driven back into medieval situations. Women who were liberated, women who were doctors and lawyers and poets and writers and - you know, pushed back into this Shia set against Sunnis. The U.S. is supporting al-Qaeda militias all over this region and pretending that it's fighting Islam. So we are in a situation that is psychopathic.

  Arundhati Roy

  Country, War, Fighting

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The whole thing that Dante [Alighieri] did was summed up in the medieval world. It's like St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. He didn't invent it, he just put it all in one package. You get twelve fat books there sitting in any library. Whereas... I think if Joshi thinks [H.P.] Lovecraft was doing anything like that, just throwing together all this stuff to form a kind of anti-mythology, that's where I would disagree with him.

  Paul Laffoley

  Book, Thinking, Library

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.

  Eric Corley

  War, Practice, Ideas

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• America did not need to be discovered because quite simply America had the American-Indians. There were whole groups of people that already lived there including very developed societies such as the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans. But then came the European vision that saw the conquest as a source of advanced growth away from medieval Europe. The new revolutionary bourgeois trend formed a new perspective on what was democracy that they saw as an improvement to the democracy of ancient Greece.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Europe, America, Perspective

  "The Future of Cuba". Interview with Lasonas Pipinis Velasco, www.counterpunch.org. February 27, 2015.

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• What the great mentor is always looking for is a person who is willing to tap his genius, to put it through the refiner's fire, to do the hard work to develop it. Indeed, mentoring is the medieval art of alchemy-turning plain old human steel into hearts and minds of gold.

  Oliver DeMille

  Art, Hard Work, Fire

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• When they're shooting, when they're chopping off the heads of our people and other people, when they are chopping off the heads of people because they happen to be a Christian in the Middle East, when ISIS is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding? As far as I'm concerned, we have to fight fire with fire.

  Donald Trump

  Christian, Fighting, Fire

  Interview with David Muir, abcnews.go.com. January 25, 2017.

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• Our belief in salvation through the market is very much in the Utopian tradition. The economists and managers are the servants of God. Like the medieval scholastics, their only job is to uncover the divine plan. They could never create or stop it. At most they might aspire to small alterations.

  John Ralston Saul

  Jobs, Servant Of God, Might

  John Ralston Saul (1999). “The Unconscious Civilization”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

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

  Jack Larson

  Art, People, Portraying

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• There isn't any (afterlife), you dingbat! This is it, baby! Enjoy, carefully! 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. So God made man in His own image? It's just the other way around. Man made God in his own image. It's all about money.

  Phyllis Diller

  Baby, Men, Ideas

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