14th Century Quotes

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

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Barbara W. Tuchman

#3. Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#4. Anyone who was alive during the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 14th century experienced something terrifyingly close to the widespread death and chaos of an apocalyptic event.

Alan Huffman

#5. I think it would be over-exaggeration to think that there are millions of viruses ready to jump on us and bring us back to the 14th century. That would be looking over a ledge that isn't there.

Anthony Fauci

#6. In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine.

Leonard Mlodinow

#7. 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.

Barbara Tuchman

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

Barbara W. Tuchman

#9. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

Sam Harris

#10. While husbands and lovers in the stories [of the 14th century] are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.

Barbara Tuchman

#11. Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.

Peter Ackroyd

#12. A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history
certain humans are situations.

Lyn Hejinian

#13. No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.

Barbara Tuchman

#14. To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.

Walter Darby Bannard

#15. No female iniquity was more severely condemned [in the 14th century] than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

Barbara Tuchman

#16. In the case of a Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to those whom I deflowered, if they can be found.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#17. Woman [in the 14th century] was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.

Barbara Tuchman

#18. With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.

Ken Follett

#19. 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.

Barbara Tuchman

#20. 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.

Barbara Tuchman

#21. Jay-Z and Kanye West are to authentic rap culture what diseased rates were to 14th century Europeans

Dean Cavanagh

#22. The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.

Barbara Tuchman

#23. I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits.

Julian Fellowes

#24. 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.

Barbara Tuchman

#25. 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.

Barbara Tuchman

#26. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction;

Friedrich Nietzsche

#27. A person is nothing if not the product of the lies he believes about himself.

Bobby Adair

#28. 14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness.

Peter Landesman

#29. Sell a country?! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?

Tecumseh

#30. Having a comic in the White House will assure stability in foreign relations. The world will continue to respond to foreign initiatives by saying, 'You must be joking.'

Pat Paulsen

#31. First time you hear something, it sounds outlandish and broken and like it doesn't make sense. But once it's been in your head awhile it's as if the other thoughts in there wriggle out of the way to give it some room.

Michael Marshall Smith

#32. I was kind of scared of failing at acting.

James Franco