Charles Oman > Quotes

“Wherever Mohammedanism has taken root, it has led at first to rapid and enthusiastic outbursts of vigor, but it seems gradually to sap the energy of the nations which adopt it, and leads, after a”
― Charles Oman, The Dark Ages - Book II of III

“he who has trembled before the pedagogue's rod will not face the spear willingly.”
― Charles Oman, The Dark Ages - Book I of III

“the diarist very wisely writes, “one could not be too guarded in one’s conduct with such heroes.”{201}”
― Charles William Chadwick Oman, Wellington's Army 1809-1814 [Illustrated Edition]

“The Vandal King's special foibles were the conclusion of treaties and armistices which he did not intend to keep, and a large piratical disregard for the need of any pretext or justification for his raids,”
― Charles Oman, The Dark Ages - Book I of III

“He rose early, spent his day in administrative duties, and his night in reading and writing. As he grew older he seemed to dispense with sleep altogether, as if he had become free from the common necessities of man’s nature. There was something strange and horrible in his cold-blooded, untiring energy; superstitious men whispered that he was inspired by a restless demon who gave him no peace, or that he was actually a demon himself Had not a belated courtier met him after midnight pacing the dark corridors of the palace with a fearful and changed countenance that was no longer human, or even — as the story grew — with no face at all, a shapeless monstrous shadow?”
― Charles William Chadwick Oman, The Dark Ages 476-918 A.D.

“Considering the tenor of the whole of Theodoric’s previous life, it is most improbable that he had any such wild scheme of intolerance in hand. But he had certainly grown gloomy, suspicious, and hard in his declining days, and it was well for his own fame, as well as for his subjects, that he was carried off by dysentery not long after the death of Pope John. It would have been still better, both for king and people, had the end come three years earlier, before his first harsh dealings with Boethius. His unpopularity at the moment of his death is shown by the survival of several curious legends, which tell how holy hermits saw his soul dragged down to hell by the injured ghosts of John and Symmachus, or carried off by the fiend himself.”
― Charles William Chadwick Oman, The Dark Ages 476-918 A.D.

“Like so many other French generals in the Peninsula, he was soon to find that victory is not the same thing as conquest.”
― Charles William Chadwick Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, Volume II January to September 1809: From the Battle of Corunna to the End of the Talavera Campaign [Illustrated Edition]

“His mental powers alone made him formidable, for he was not only a general of note, but a wily politician, faithless not with the light and heady fickleness of a savage, but with the deliberate and malicious treachery of a professional intriguer.”
― Charles Oman, The Dark Ages - Book I of III

“Most of us still believe to-day, that [history] is not merely concerned with the stringing together of facts in their correct order and the reconstruction of annals, but with something more. We must draw the moral . . . [W]e yet hold that history has its lessons, and that they can be discovered and taught. ‘The experience of the past’, as Stubbs wrote, ‘can be carried into the present: study gives us maxims as well as dry facts.”
― Charles Oman

“when brought into contact with the empire, picked up all the vices of its decaying civilisation without losing those of his original barbarism. It is not without some reason that the doings of Gaiseric have left their mark on the history of language in the shape of the modern word ' Vandalism.”
― Charles Oman, The Dark Ages - Book I of III

“Rhodes had fallen into their hands, and the long-prostrate Colossus had been sold for old brass to a Jewish dealer, and exported to Syria to be melted down.”
― Charles William Chadwick Oman, The Dark Ages 476-918 A.D.

“He was not one of the stalwart, hard-fighting, brainless chiefs who were generally to be found at the head of a German horde, but a man of very moderate stature, limping all his life through from a kick that he got from a horse in early youth. His mental powers alone made him formidable, for he was not only a general of note, but a wily politician, faithless not with the light and heady fickleness of a savage, but with the deliberate and malicious treachery of a professional intriguer. He was one of those not uncommon instances of a Teuton, who, when brought into contact with the empire, picked up all the vices of its decaying civilisation without losing those of his original barbarism.”
― Charles William Chadwick Oman, The Dark Ages 476-918 A.D.