“The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.”

They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.

The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.

If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

Completeness is rare in history.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.