“No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.”

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

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

There are lots of people in the world who have money. Lots of people in Morecambe have money, let alone the world. And Morecambe is quite a small place.

It is an in, a grave evil and a disturbance of the right order, for a larger and higher organisation, to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies.

The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.

The smaller you strip things down, the more you depend on the songs and yourself, as opposed to arrangements.

Me personally, I come from very, very humble beginnings – little, small town in Alabama, you know, staying at my granddaddy house. We really didn’t have nothing.

I’d just like to say that I have a personal disgust for small dogs, like poodles. I have some serious physical problems with them. Everything about them means I must kill them. I must.

A lot of people have a misconception of what the ghetto is all about. You know, it’s only a small percentage of the people that are bad. Everybody else is good.

If your mother does not love you well or is no longer here to love you well, may you feel worthy enough to open to the thousand tiny ways the spirit of mother longs to love you today.