Medieval Quotes - Page 9

• If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.

  Richard Dawkins

  Doors, Miracle, Faces

  "God vs. Science". Interview with David Van Biema, content.time.com. November 5, 2006.

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• Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.

  Umberto Eco

  People, Church, Goes On

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• A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval Carmina Burana - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

  James Fenton

  Latin, Age, Doe

  "It ain't necessarily so" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. October 18, 2002.

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• If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

  Joshua Foer

  Book, Reading, Ideas

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.104, Penguin

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• I listen to a lot of medieval music.

  Grimes

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• I decorated my house like a medieval gothic castle, European-style. Chandeliers and red velvet curtains. My bedroom is pink and black, my bathroom is totally Hello Kitty, I have a massive pink couch and a big antique gold cross.

  Avril Lavigne

  Motivational, House, Black

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• In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

  Terry Pratchett

  Art, Book, Character

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• I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.

  Eli Roth

  Epic, Historical, Want

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• Childhood is not dead. Children were worse off when we were hunter-gatherers; they were threatened in medieval times and exploited during the Industrial Revolution. Was it any better in the time of Charles Kingsley or Charles Dickens?

  Robert Winston

  Children, Childhood, Hunters

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• Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Laughter, Our World, People

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• In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

  Umberto Eco

  War, Fire, Flames

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• with the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.

  John Kennedy Toole

  Taste, Chaos, Dunces

  John Kennedy Toole (2004). “A Confederacy of Dunces”, p.41, LSU Press

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• Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts for inspiration--and there are a lot of those texts. We have King Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish; Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage medieval romance for all we're worth.

  David Eddings

  Kings, Inspiration, Knights

  David Eddings, Leigh Eddings (2007). “The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of THE BELGARIAD and THE MALLOREON”, p.6, Del Rey

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• A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

  Norman Mailer

  Horse, Fear, Fighting

  Norman Mailer (1968). “The idol and the octopus: political writings, on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations”

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• The modern geography of the brain has a deliciously antiquated feel to it - rather like a medieval map with the known world encircled by terra incognito where monsters roam.

  David Bainbridge

  Brain, Monsters, World

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• Can I get a fork?; There were no utensils in medieval times, hence there ARE no utensils AT Medieval Times- would you like a refill on your Pepsi? ;So there were no utensils but there was Pepsi?; Dude, I got a lot of tables to wait

  Matthew Broderick

  Cheesy Love, Waiting, Pepsi

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• According to the Tax Foundation, taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family's budget. That is more than is spent on food, clothing, housing, and transportation combined. Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output - and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?

  Daniel J. Mitchell

  Average, Giving, Liberty

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• ...the history of early-medieval Arabia is nearly all legend. Like Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and other founders of patriarchal religions, Mohammed lacks real verification. There is no reliable information about his life or teachings. Most stories about him are as apocryphal as the story that his coffin hangs forever in mid-air "between heaven and earth," like the bodies of ancient sacred kings.

  Barbara G. Walker

  Jesus, Kings, Real

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• In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!

  Steven Pinker

  School, College, Intuition

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• Thank goodness we don't live in medieval times, when people fought wars over ideas.

  Wojciech Jaruzelski

  War, Ideas, People

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• In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Reality, Class, World

  Alfred North Whitehead (1997). “Science and the Modern World”, p.197, Simon and Schuster

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• In medieval times, the Church used to sell 'indulgences' for money. This amounted to paying for some number of days' remission from purgatory, and the Church literally (and with breathtaking presumption) issued signed certificates specifying the number of days off that had been purchased. . . . And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history. . . .

  Richard Dawkins

  Rip, Numbers, Religion

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• It [the scientific revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. . . . It looms so large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Real, Science, Historical

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• In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.

  Arthur Koestler

  Order, Names, Historical

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• I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking.

  Paul Wolfowitz

  Ideas, People, Flags

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