These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle
The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the in...
The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages,
The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later tim...
The occasions when an individual is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey’s speech proved to be one of those junctures by which people afterward date events.
The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change.
The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.
Not a passing phenomenon nor an external force, the companies had become a way of life, a part of society itself, used and joined by its rulers even as they struggled to throw them off. They ate at so...
In the same five years three new colleges were founded at Cambridge—Trinity, Corpus Christi, and Clare—although love of learning, like love in marriage, was not always the motive. Corpus Christi was f...
I managed to weave my way in and around it, a maneuver one learns in the process of writing history—to muffle the facts a bit when one can’t understand everything—watch Gibbon do it in those sonorous...
His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.
Had I known that these legs were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better care of them when I was a lad. Duke of Grafton
German soldiers, posted as informers, were found dressed as peasants, even as peasant women. The latter were discovered, presumably in the course of non-military action, by their government issued und...
Fate represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.
A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.
Wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people, and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for lowness of blod or foulenesse of body...
The irony of man’s fate reflected in his image: that all men, from beggar to emperor, from harlot to queen, from ragged clerk to Pope, must come to this. No matter what their poverty or power in life,...
Liberality in gifts and expenditure which, since his followers lived off it, was extolled as the most admired attribute of a noble.
Forces on taking sugar islands in the West Indies or besieging Gibraltar or collecting an assault force for the invasion of Britain, because the place to defeat the English was in America. Pleas from...
Ecclesiam nulla salus