Medieval Quotes

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval. (Peter Singer)
In the West there has always been the attempt to try make the religious building, whether it's a Medieval or Renaissance church, an eternal object for the celebration of God. The material chosen, such as stone, brick, or concrete, is meant to eternally preserve what is inside. View quote
Tadao Ando
Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day. View quote
Wilhelm Dilthey
The medieval Church believed that the resurrection of Christ marked a new time for all of humanity. View quote
Timothy Radcliffe
The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon. View quote
Frank Zappa
Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers. View quote
William Shatner
A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat. View quote
Norman Mailer
Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology. View quote
Ian Hacking
But I don't even think you hear me at all Under your medieval ceiling behind your biblical wall. View quote
Rufus Wainwright
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East. (Martin Amis)
The idea that it is funny to see wild animals coerced into acting like clumsy humans, or thrilling to see powerful beasts reduced to cringing cowards by a whip-cracking trainer, is primitive and medieval. It stems from the old idea that we are superior to other species and have the right to hold dominion over them. View quote
Desmond Morris
With the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy. View quote
John Kennedy Toole
I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought. View quote
Kenneth Boulding
The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God? View quote
Barbara Tuchman
That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That's not possible. View quote
Emir Kusturica
In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. View quote
Richard Rogers
As medieval Christian man could only conceive of religion in terms of a trinity, so his modern descendant can only conceive of politics in terms of a theology or, as we now say, ideology, of left-wing and right-wing forces and factions. View quote
Bernard Lewis
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book. (John McGahern)
The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India. View quote
Hu Shih
We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds. View quote
Eqbal Ahmad
Historically, art has always had a market. When one medieval fiefdom defeated another they would drag back its jewels, gold, tapestries and art objects as the spoils of war. Art equaled power, riches and culture. View quote
Arne Glimcher