J.M. Roberts Quotes

#1. Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.

J.M. Roberts

#2. The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

J.M. Roberts

#3. If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse.

J.M. Roberts

#4. There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that a large contribution was made to them by the Church. In part this was a matter of its hostile stance towards sexuality.

J.M. Roberts

#5. Outsiders became keen to join an organization [European Community] that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. - written before 2003.

J.M. Roberts

#6. Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.

J.M. Roberts

#7. Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if only indirectly and collectively, and not to have to bear its burdens.

J.M. Roberts

#8. What men do is shaped by what they believe they can do.

J.M. Roberts