The 14th Century Quotes

1. "During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast generalization. At the present juncture, it is obviously very doubtful whether this task could be accomplished in a similar way, even by a mind with gifts so peculiarly suited for the purpose as Humboldt's was, and if all his time and work were devoted to the purpose."
Author: Alexander Von Humboldt

2. "Only God was able to create a free creature, and freedom could only arise by the act of creation. Freedom is not the result or product of evolution. Freedom and product are disparate ideas. God does not produce or construct. He creates. We used to say the same for artists, for the artist who constructs does not create a personality but rather a poster of man. A personality cannot be constructed. Maybe sooner or later, during this century or after a million years of continued civilization, man will succeed in constructing an imitation of himself, a kind of robot or monster, something similar to its constructor. This human-looking monster may look very much like man, but one thing is certain: it will never have freedom. Without a divine touch, the result of evolution would not have been man, but rather a developed animal, a super-animal, a creature with a human body and intelligence but without a heart and personality."
Author: Alija Izetbegovic

3. "For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use."
Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

4. "[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death."
Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

5. "The scientists at the end of the 19th century had people coming to them with this weird behaviour, and they didn't know what was going on but there seemed to be a similarity. They needed an answer, so they made up one."
Author: Chester Brown

6. "Daltrey was by all accounts the toughest man in the Who; maybe the toughest man in London. Filled with blue collar attitude, he strutted around the stage, screaming out the rage of a century of London's dead end lives, roaring like a young lion trapped in a decadent, dying England. Townsend wrote prettily, daydreaming foolishly individualistic dreams of artistic expression, but it was Roger's sledghammer voice that smashed the skulls of the enemy."
Author: Dave Marsh

7. "I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism."
Author: David Eagleman

8. "Jay-Z and Kanye West are to authentic rap culture what diseased rates were to 14th century Europeans"
Author: Dean Cavanagh

9. "I even tried to usher her into this century by explaining that wearing rainbows didn't automatically mean a person was gay. The Lucky Charms leprechaun was not necessarily a homosexual. The Care Bear with the rainbow on his tummy did not have a life partner. He didn't even have genitals. (6)"
Author: Elna Baker

10. "Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!... Stay, let me take breath..."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11. "The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer. "Be willing to be blind, and give up all longing to know the why and how, for knowing will be more of a hindrance than a help." This 1912 edition was edited by Evelyn Underhill, and contains her introduction."
Author: Geerhardus Vos

12. "[Stares at dead knight, killed by the Direwolves]Ersen: If he had sounded his horn...Theon: Try and imagine it was you up there, Ersen. Its dark and cold. You have been walking century for hours looking forward to the end of your watch. Then you hear a noise and you move forward to the gate, and suddenly, you see eyes glowing green and gold in the torchlight.Two shadows come rushing toward you faster than you can believe. You catch a glimpse of teeth, start to level your spear, and they slam into you and open your belly, tearing through leather as if it was cheese cloth.[Shoves Ersen hard]Theon: And now you're down on you back, your guts are spilling out and one of them has his teeth around your neck.[Grabs Ersen around the neck and sqeezes]Theon: Tell me, at what moment during all of this do you stop to blow your Fucking horn?"[Shoves Ersen roughly]"
Author: George R.R. Martin

13. "For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny. Readers in our flooded landscape use their own perceptiveness. But an advance can be of some help. If you believe that the canon in time will select itself, you still can follow a critical impulse to hasten the process, as I did with the later Stevens, Ashbury, and, more recently, Henri Cole."
Author: Harold Bloom

14. "...I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.'What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.'Employers sense in me a denial of their values.' He rolled over onto his back. 'They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library."
Author: John Kennedy Toole

15. "For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career."
Author: John Lothrop Motley

16. "But the fact is, Mr. Chairman, for all the challenges the Postal Service of the 21st century faces, it still retains its traditional place as a key cog in how American businesses conduct their affairs and how Americans all across this land communicate."
Author: John M. McHugh

17. "Referencing 2 Corinthians 4:6, Robert Hewitt compares jars of clay in the first century to the same value we would put on a cardboard box. Joni Eareckson Tada queries whether we would question God's right to leave some holes in the box in order to give glimpses of the treasure inside"
Author: Joni Eareckson Tada

18. "I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits."
Author: Julian Fellowes

19. "But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm."
Author: Karlheinz Stockhausen

20. "This is who Ezra is dating now. He is now into girls who are into dressing up as nineteenth century prostitutes. For the hats."
Author: Leila Sales

21. "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."
Author: Leonard Mlodinow

22. "The role of an orchestra in the 21st century isn't just playing, it's about developing future audiences and performers."
Author: Leonard Slatkin

23. "If we turn now to such vestiges of cult as are associated otherwise than with time and season, we discover a definite recognition of the survival of these nearly a century ago. Keightley, the old fairy mythologist, who did such yeoman service in the collection of much valuable elfin lore, says, as long ago as 1850, when referring to the confused nature of his subject: 'Indeed it could not well be otherwise, when we recollect that all these beings (the larger and greater fairies) once formed part of ancient and exploded systems of religion and that it is chiefly in the traditions of the peasantry that their memorial has been preserved."
Author: Lewis Spence

24. "This is not exactly what I had in mind when I agreed to miss lunch," Alex said grumpily forty minutes later. He shifted uncomfortably and tried to see what I was doing.I stared him back into submission. "Wait."The art room is usually empty Thursday afternoons except for me. Ms. Evers leaves early to teach her UArts class and looks up.Of course, I am one of the few entrusted with the Secret Location of the Key.A few feet away from where I sat perched on a stool,Alex was posed on the anchient chaise we use for figure drawing. It's a relic, probably from the Palladinetti years: chipped mahogany and dusty velvet, what little remaining stuffing pokes out from a century of holes. I was probably luxurious once. Now it's like sitting on a slightly smelly board. But I'd wanted to sketch Alex as I so often saw him, reclining with his head propped on one hand,listening or talking or coaxing me to put down the glass, already,Ella,and come here."
Author: Melissa Jensen

25. "I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

26. "Ezio considered the new century they were in - the sixteenth. And only near its beginning. What would unfold during it, he could only guess; he knew that, at his age, he would not see very much more of it. More discoveries, and more wars, no doubt. But essentially the same play repeating itself - and the same actors, only with different costumes and different props for each generation that swallows up the last, each thinking that it would be the one to do better."
Author: Oliver Bowden

27. "But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception."
Author: Oscar Wilde

28. "A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. DuringWorld War II, tens of thousands of people might perish in a battle, and if the public could see it at all it was in a grainy newsreel in a movie theater weeks later. During World War I a small elite could read about the progress of the conflict in the newspaper(without pictures). During the nineteenth century there was almost no access to news in a timely fashion for anyone."
Author: Ray Kurzweil

29. "The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable. Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two."
Author: Robert Fogel

30. "Writers in what we now call the Middle English period (late twelfth century to 1485) did not necessarily always write in English. The language was in a state of flux: attempts were made to assert the French language, to keep down the local language, English, and to make the language of the church (Latin) the language of writing."
Author: Ronald Carter

31. "What is wrong with the Iranians in addition to the nuclear bomb? This is the only country on Earth in the 21st century that has renewed imperialistic ambitions. They really want to become the hegemon of the Middle East in an age that gave up imperialism."
Author: Shimon Peres

32. "Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."
Author: Thomas Mann

33. "This century hasn't got the lock on insanity."
Author: William Peter Blatty

34. "I believe the lion's share of the history of the 21st century is going to play out in the Asian Pacific region not the US."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

The 14th Century Quotes Pictures