“The power to command frequently causes failure to think.”

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

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.

How could science be an enemy of religion when God commanded man to be a scientist the day He told him to rule the earth and subject it?

Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin. God commands you to pray, but He forbids you to worry.

To serve the Queen of Heaven is already to reign there, and to live under her commands is more than to govern.

The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed.

True perfection consists in the love of God and our neighbour, and the better we keep both these commandments, the more perfect we shall be.

Every moment comes to us pregnant with a command from God, only to pass on and plunge into eternity, there to remain forever what we have made of it.

On the question of relating to our fellowman – our neighbor’s spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else we do is a means to an end. But love is an end already, since God is love.

Do not confuse the command to love with the disease to please.