Quotes About Middle Ages

#1. Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day - respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.

Anna Julia Cooper

#2. In 1352, Ibn Batuta, the greatest Arab-language traveler of the Middle Ages, who had journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visiting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt, including an elaborate mosque.

Mark Kurlansky

#3. So it was with court jesters in the Middle Ages; they could alert the king to dangers that the ministers would not dare to comment on because they were afraid of losing their positions.

Paulo Coelho

#4. Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?" And

Elie Wiesel

#5. All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

Richard Dawkins

#6. The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages.

Alexandre Dumas

#7. Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?

Varlam Shalamov

#8. Big Stupid leapt up. Little Duane had a gun. Big Stupid punched Little Duane so hard his whole family tree died back to the Middle Ages.

Victor Gischler

#9. Since the Middle Ages, people have been writing about angels. Angelology was actually at one point a scholastic discipline.

Danielle Trussoni

#10. Our knowledge will take its revenge on us, just as ignorance exacted its revenge during the Middle Ages.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#11. For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.

John Grierson

#12. It's only a matter of time before it all starts to fall apart, before things start to fall off. Short legs, long body. The kind of person who in the Middle Ages would come up over the hill on his horse, and they'd say, 'Get Wogan,' and I'd be there with my shield, the first to die.

Terry Wogan

#13. SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

Henry David Thoreau

#14. During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It's unfortunate that we've lost the art of illumination.

Joshua Foer

#15. Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.

Dario Fo

#16. Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

Michael Dirda

#17. Strange how blind people are! They are horrified by the torture chambers of the Middle Ages, but their arsenals fill them with pride!

Bertha Von Suttner

#18. Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

Karl Kraus

#19. I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in. It's like Christianity in the Middle Ages.

Wesley Morris

#20. The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.

Harold Innis

#21. But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.

Goldwin Smith

#22. Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.

C.S. Lewis

#23. He's this Goth dude, can control people." "Goth, like a Visigoth German Viking of the middle ages, or a Neil Gaiman-looking, Robert Smith, make-up-and-moonbeams Cure fan?" "What's a Neil Gaiman?" "You're an idiot.

Charles De Lint

#24. factory's problems arose from the introduction of an industrial process in a country with a language and culture stuck in the Middle Ages. The

Antonio Garrido

#25. In the absence of evidence, superstition. It's a Middle Ages thing. That's my theory anyway.

Tucker Carlson

#26. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.

Goldwin Smith

#27. Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It's the sin of my middle age, too.

Mignon McLaughlin

#28. Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.

Hans Arp

#29. It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.

N. T. Wright

#30. The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

Tom Robbins

#31. During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.

David Novak

#32. Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now.

Pete Seeger

#33. Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey.

Sharon Kay Penman

#34. Contrary to popular belief, there aren't that many descriptions of hell in the Bible, and the majority of images most people carry around in their heads are from the fourteenth-century poem, which means that our contemporary view of hell is actually from the Middle Ages.

Craig Johnson

#35. Since early middle ages when people generally taking away the barbarity of their like, were pretty content. Although it was all an illicit contentment, what with the slave systems all over the world, in England especially, the peasants and the master, etc. People were incredibly content.

David Bowie

#36. In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Umberto Eco

#37. THE HISTORY OF THE middle ages presents no spectacle more imposing than the Crusades, in which are to be seen the nations of Asia and of Europe armed against each other, two religions contending for superiority, and disputing the empire of the world.

Jospeh Michaud

#38. Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.

Benoit Mandelbrot

#39. I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.

Jerome K. Jerome

#40. Fear accomplishes much in love. The husband of the Middle Ages was loved by his wife for his very severity. The bride of William the Conqueror, having been beaten by him, recognized him by this token for her lord and husband

Jules Michelet

#41. In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

George Grosz

#42. You will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels. these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world.

Charles Williams

#43. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Carl Jung

#44. There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.

Goldwin Smith

#45. But if you cannot at once laugh at a thing or believe in it, you have no business in the Middle Ages. Or in the world for that matter.

G.K. Chesterton

#46. Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them.

Jean Baudrillard

#47. Huxley suggests that the reason there aren't nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.

Michael Pollan

#48. Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.

John Shimkus

#49. Did you know the English wouldn't dream of putting olive oil on food? They use it for ear infections. Freddie told me."
"Yes, I've heard their cuisine hasn't evolved since the Middle Ages.

Glenn Haybittle

#50. In the middle ages, people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today's shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead.

Charles Krauthammer

#51. Any beings advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances are at least a thousand years beyond our technical level. Spending gobs of time examining our missiles is equivalent to sending the Air Force back to the Middle Ages and insisting they examine the chain mail factories.

Seth Shostak

#52. The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can't cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.

John Brunner

#53. It's like suddenly in the Middle Ages, people figured men should be in charge of women's bodies since they were in charge of pretty much everything else

Inga Muscio

#54. The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages, only then will Israel be calm for the next 40 years.

Michael Ben-Ari

#55. If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.

Goldwin Smith

#56. In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, they read usually, not as today, principally with the eyes, but with the lips, pronouncing what they saw, and with the ears, listening to the words pronounced. hearing what is called the "voices of the pages." It is a real acoustical reading.

Jean Leclercq

#57. Being an author of a book is like being a mother of a debutante in the Middle Ages. You have to present your baby to society and provide her with dowry, and in your heart, you hope that some royalty spends a night with her and ensures her way to success.

Elvira Baryakina

#58. Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

Richard Kearney

#59. Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.

Hilaire Belloc

#60. In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

Robert Runcie

#61. Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters.

David Byrne

#62. The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages.

Bill Gates

#63. At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.

Yuval Noah Harari

#64. Claude Debussy defined the guitar as an expressive harpsicord. I believe that is the best definition ever given of the Spanish guitar. This phrase is the starting point for my Concierto de Aranjuez Our guitar is the only survivor of the rich and anarchic instrumental wildlife of the Middle Ages.

Joaquin Rodrigo

#65. In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake.

Hans Christian Andersen

#66. Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages - certainly the early Middle Ages - as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking.

Nicola Griffith

#67. Last fight I had with the bitch ended way too soon."
Eddie rolled his eyes and glanced at Jim. "It was in the Middle Ages and he still hasn't gotten over it.

J.R. Ward

#68. If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.

Carol Rifka Brunt

#69. The main, as well as the least obvious, achievement of the Middle Ages was the creation of the experimental spirit and this was primarily due to the Muslims down to the 12th century.

George Sarton

#70. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part

George Orwell

#71. Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

Goldwin Smith

#72. At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation - yet they did. Change does happen.

Rowan Williams

#73. The Egyptians had the locusts and in the Middle Ages there was the Black Death with the rats, but tourists are the plague of our century and we'll not survive this one.

Richard Conniff

#74. The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.

Horatio Alger

#75. The Middle Ages were long preoccupied with the nature of the concept, or of the notion which the intellect abstracts from the object; but they never doubted that its content was borrowed from the content of the object, still less that the object really existed.

Etienne Gilson

#76. That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#77. We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity
romantic love and gunpowder.

Andre Maurois

#78. With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).

W.C. Sellar

#79. The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

George Santayana

#80. Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that.

Samuel R. Delany

#81. New Rule: Churches have to stop ringing the damn bells. It was a good idea in the Middle Ages, but people have clocks now. It's not like you're doing us all a favor by keeping the hunchbacks off the street. Make up your mind, are you a house of worship or an ice cream truck?

Bill Maher

#82. Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.

Nancy Pearcey

#83. When humanity finally emerges from the Middle Ages altogether, when he stops connecting psychic behavior with"the work of the Devil" or with some unknown, unmentionable force, then he will emerge into the New Age of enlightenment.

Daniel Logan

#84. Jews, there are bound to be misconceptions. During the Middle Ages, they were even accused of causing the bubonic plague by poisoning wells in European towns, but that is simply not true.

C.H. Dalton

#85. In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.

Jack Schwartz

#86. Throughout the Middle Ages, art and architecture had a spiritual mission: to direct man's attention toward God. Churches soared in that direction, and sculpture and paintings pointed the way to paradise. They depicted the sufferings of Christ, the Apostles, martyrs, the Last Judgment, and so on.

Jesse Bryant Wilder

#87. There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

Lytton Strachey

#88. The fundamental issue, when it comes to Europe's future, will be whether and how we manage to transfer the ideals that once made Europe great - especially its Christian roots - into today's changed world. No one wants to return to the Middle Ages.

Walter Kasper

#89. The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book,' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

Art Spiegelman

#90. But in the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them.

Hans Blix

#91. Maimonides is the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, and quite possibly of all time.

David Zulberg

#92. In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.

Mikhail Bakunin

#93. It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.

Isaac Mayer Wise

#94. In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)

Joseph Reese Strayer

#95. 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

#96. In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega
a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#97. There are, if I may so say, three powerful spirits, which have from time to time, moved on the face of the waters, and given a predominant impulse to the moral sentiments and energies of mankind. These are the spirits of liberty, of religion, and of honor. - HALLAM, Europe in the Middle Ages.

Inazo Nitobe

#98. Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.

David Lodge

#99. In the Middle Ages, I think the French kings murdered slightly fewer of their family members than the English kings, though I haven't actually counted the heads.

Karen Maitland

#100. There is no greater motor for architecture than religious fervor. Ancient examples include the Inca, Aztec Egyptian civilizations. In more recent times, Christianity gave rise to the Gothic and Romanesque architecture of the European middle ages and Islam produced the wonders of the Ottoman Empire.

Helen Grant Ross