Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if h...
A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit, quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night,
He obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.
What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never g...
Vouchsafe, O Lord,21 to bless this workroom of Thy servants, declared the dedication of one scriptorium, that all which they write therein may be comprehended by their intelligence and realized in the...
Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all t...
The patricians urge [Coriolanus] to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in...
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?
I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life (5.3.57–58).
Flaubert: Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.
The discourse of travel in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance is rarely if ever interesting at the level of sustained narrative and teleological design, but gripping at the level of the anecdote...
One of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aureli...
Monks were strictly forbidden to change what they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying.
Book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, In...
Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal damnation and a fine of 10 ducats.
Unlike many other animals, who are endowed at birth with what they need to survive, human infants are almost completely vulnerable:
To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as It is not as you say, there is a heavy penalty: an imposition of silence or fifty blows. The high walls that hedged about the m...
The parchment is hairy
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.