“The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.”

We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

For knowledge is light, life, felicity, perfection, beauty and the means of approaching the Threshold of Unity. It is the honor and glory of the world of humanity

I have reaffirmed my political will to work towards national unity.

I beseech you, one and all, to add your prayers to mine to the end that war and bloodshed cease, and that love, friendship, peace and unity reign in the world.

You are the ones who are called to uplift the cause of unity among the nations of the earth.

This eternal bond should be made secure by a firm covenant, and the intention should be to foster harmony, fellowship and unity and to attain everlasting life.

Your words bring me joy. Let the two of us unite to bring forth a world of peace and virtue.

You are the Supreme Being, and yet thinking yourself to be separate from it, you strive to become united with it. What is stranger than this?

Small endeavours obtain strength by unity of action: the most powerful are broken down by discord.