Michael Wood > Quotes

“The tale of someone's life begins before they are born.”
― Michael Wood, Shakespeare

“The theologian and the executioner have been intimates throughout history.”
― Michael Wood, In Search of the First Civilizations

“People are far too quick to judge others, especially when they don’t have the full facts.
--from the book For Reasons Unknown”
― Michael Wood

“Robeck was a historical person who argued that loving life was ridiculous and sought to prove his point by drowning himself in 1739.”
― Michael Wood, Candide

“Meanwhile, new ideas crept like a damp stain into the very fabric of Tang culture, casting a shadow across the world of the old aristocratic clans that had survived.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

“there are no devils. Inhumanity is the real evil,”
― Michael Wood, In Search Of Shakespeare

“In his use of certain words – heaven (tian), ‘the Way’ (dao), monarch (wang)”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“the incantations, the burnt offerings and the bovine sacrifices, went back more than 3,000 years”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“Finally, on 21 June, the empress dowager declared war on the eight foreign powers and fled the capital.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“So the Yellow River is a constant, unpredictable and often terrifying character in the story of China, nothing like the benign life-bearing flood of the Egyptian Nile, whose rising was celebrated each year with unerring predictability on 15 August, or the Tigris in Mesopotamia, whose summer rising was greeted into the twentieth century with liturgies and food offerings, even in Muslim households.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

“the empress dowager changed her views on the Boxers and issued an edict”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“In the third millennium BCE, modern archaeology has shown that there were indeed thousands of villages and dozens of small ‘states’ dotted across the river valleys of central China, rectangular walled towns of rammed earth, each with its own ruler. And in that period our narrative begins.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

“Xi: the literature is truly enormous, no less than for Aristotle. Crucial”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“that was widely believed to support the Boxers and their slogan ‘Support the Qing,”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“Tonally, the jagged syntax of ‘Inch-thick’, the Ovidian lyricism of ‘O Proserpina’ and Autolycus’s bawdy swagger show Shakespeare at his widest-ranging. This is total mastery. Nobody had taken the English language further, and nobody has done so since.”
― Michael Wood, In Search Of Shakespeare

“The first people in Britain were nomadic hunters, food gatherers, who were followed in around 3500 BC by settlers who first cultivated land and raised crops. These people were of Celtic stock and spoke a Celtic language, the distant ancestor of today’s Welsh, Cornish and Breton.”
― Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages

“In about 75 BC a new wave of settlers invaded Britain. We call them the Belgae, as the Romans did. They came from a part of France called by the Romans Gallia Belgica. They were great metalworkers and produced gold, silver, bronze and iron ornaments of marvellous workmanship; they also revolutionised agriculture by inventing a new, heavy plough.”
― Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages

“He is not didactic, like Sidney or Jonson. He doesn’t tell you what he thinks, or what you should think, and he never preaches. Rather he sets up oppositions, multiple viewpoints, and then holds his mirror up to nature.”
― Michael Wood, In Search Of Shakespeare

“The rebel groups were loosely coordinated, inspired by millenarian hopes for the coming of the Maitreya Buddha and Manichaean-tinged beliefs about the imminent arrival of a saviour, a prince of light, who would defeat the powers of darkness.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

“century law code; the predecessor of Southampton was Hamwih;”
― Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages

“the emperor embodied Chinese ideas about order and rulership that had developed since the fourth millennium BCE,”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“Liberty did not on any account mean license.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of England

“Everyone knows the feeling of excitement on discovering a book that unlocks the imagination; it enables us to inhabit another world - of heightened language, thought and ideas. Great literature holds the seed of a kind of liberation that remains with us throughout life”
― Michael Wood, Shakespeare

“The lake district's rain was the price you paid to live amongst such beauty.”
― Michael Wood

“is that if he is not filled with pious thoughts, the spirits of the unseen will not come to the sacrifice’.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“Our search begins in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. ‘Chichi’ is one of the market towns in the highlands of the Quiche Maya. Chichi itself was a Mayan settlement before the Spanish Conquest; its two”
― Michael Wood, In Search of the First Civilizations