Medieval Quotes - Page 5

• There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Names, Achievement, World

  Vladimir Ilʹich Lenin, Slavoj Žižek (2002). “Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917”, p.311, Verso

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• I am not in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin).

  Charles Clarke

  Latin, Matter, Way

  "Clarke Denies Medieval History Slur". www.theguardian.com. May 09, 2003.

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• The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

  Gao Xingjian

  War, Moving, Europe

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• Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers.

  William Shatner

  Pain, Party, Divorce

  William Shatner (2009). “Up Till Now”, p.136, Pan Macmillan

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• The medieval theologian who gazed at the night sky through the eyes of Aristotle and saw angels moving the spheres in harmony has become the modern cosmologist who gazes at the same sky through the eyes of Einstein and sees the hand of God not in angels but in the constants of nature. When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it¹s very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it.

  Tony Rothman

  Moving, Eye, Angel

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• If the men of the Middle Ages... lived in filth and discomfort, it was not for any lack of ability to change their mode of life; it was because they chose to live this way, because filth and discomfort fitted in with their principles and prejudices, political, moral, and religious.... It was in the power of medieval... craftsmen to create armchairs and sofas that might have rivaled in comfort those of today

  Aldous Huxley

  Religious, Men, Political

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• ...belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

  Stephen King

  Children, Real, Stupid

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• It is not surprising that only one medieval state, Venice, long possessed anything clearly identifiavble as a navy in this sense. We shall see that no state in the British Isles attained attained this level of sophistication before the 16th century, and no history of the Royal Navy, in any exact sense of the words, could legitimately begin much before then. This book, which does, is not an institutional history of the Royal Navy, but a history of naval warfare as an aspect of national history. All and any methods of fighting at sea, or using the sea for warlike purposes, are its concern.

  Nicholas Rodger

  Book, Fighting, Sea

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• Medieval England was a great military power with a sophisticated machinery of government, but her naval administration, at best improvised and for long periods missing altogether, pointed to a grave weakness: the lack of any reliable means of putting a force of warships at the disposal of the crown. Only Richard I and Henry V of all the kings of England can be said to have understood the problem and attempted to remedy it. It is no coincidence that they wer by far the most successful in war.

  Nicholas Rodger

  Kings, Military, War

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• I think what inspires me is in a constant state of flux...it's easier to stick to photographers and perhaps cinematographers, though the great medieval, Mannerist, and Baroque painters of Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and German origin are a constant source of inspiration, along with select modernists like Dali.

  Anton Yelchin

  Inspiration, Thinking, Italian

  Source: www.pasunautre.com

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• 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.

  Salman Rushdie

  Islamic, World, Crime

  "In 'Joseph Anton,' Salman Rushdie Writes Novelistically About His Own Life". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 7, 2012.

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• I think five percent of all songs can be love songs, and another five percent can be miscellaneous or political, but the rest should just be about medieval feminists.

  Devendra Banhart

  Song, Thinking, Feminist

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I began to analyze the movie [The Day the Earth Stood Still] and said it was really made out of these two characters [Nikola Tesla and Leon Teremin] who were brought together. That made it fascinating to me. And especially the language they made up, that Klaatu speaks. Because it has a Latin word order. It's like medieval Latin, but it had some Navajo phonemes in it and that kind of stuff.

  Paul Laffoley

  Latin, Character, Order

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• You have people chopping off heads of Christians and others. Not since medieval times has anyone seen anything like this.

  Donald Trump

  Christian, People, Chopping

  Source: townhall.com

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• The idea that we would raise billions of sentient animals, treat them horribly, pollute our waterways with their waste, compromise the effectiveness of our antibiotics so that they grow faster, and then slaughter them with little regard to their suffering so that we can feed off their corpses, will seem to most people unthinkably cruel and barbarous - sort of in the way that we think of medieval punishments, or Europeans today think of the death penalty.

  Dale Jamieson

  Thinking, Animal, Punishment

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• When we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have - and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.

  Donald Trump

  War, Sight, Isis

  Donald Trump during Presidential Debate at Washington University St. Louis, Missouri, www.cbsnews.com. October 10, 2016.

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• 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.

  Donald Trump

  Isis, People, Levels

  Source: time.com

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• [Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice.

  Robert Hass

  Cities, Ideas, Justice

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

  Martin Amis

  Night, September 11, Islam

  "The voice of the lonely crowd" by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

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• I was influenced by the medieval theological beliefs when I presented Satan in Jesus' dream as unable to figure out who or what Jesus is, and unable to see the future.

  Anne Rice

  Dream, Jesus, Belief

  Source: www.patheos.com

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

  Louis Garrel

  Tales

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I find the niqab symbol profoundly offensive. I believe it reflects a misogynistic culture that - a treatment of women as property rather than people, which is anchored in Medieval tribal customs as opposed to any religious obligation, but I do not seek to regulate people wearing this objectionable symbol if they choose to do so.

  Jason Kenney

  Religious, Believe, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I find it pretty fascinating how humans keep gravitating towards these giant centers. I went to this walled medieval village in France this year, and it was truly the most crazy, beautiful, bizarre place I've ever been.

  Feist

  Beautiful, Crazy, Years

  Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. September 28, 2011.

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• According to my mother, there pretty much wasn't anything I wouldn't eat as a child.... I was even inclined to dig into stuff about which she expressed open disgust... cheap Chinese food with pepper so hot it made your gums feel like a medieval dentist had been at them.

  Alice Domurat Dreger

  Mother, Children, Chinese

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• Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check--agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.

  Luther Burbank

  Religious, Mean, Men

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