G.J. Meyer > Quotes

“People everywhere were being told that this war was no continuation of politics by other means, no traditional struggle for limited objectives. It was a fight to the death with the forces of evil, and the stakes were survival and civilization itself. It is no simple thing to make people believe such things and later persuade them to accept a settlement based on compromise.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“It matters also that both Henry and his daughter Elizabeth were not just rulers but consummate performers, masters of political propaganda and political theater. They”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“Added to all this was the emergence of a new set of social values—call it the Protestant ethic—that encouraged the prosperous to equate wealth with virtue and to regard the destitute as responsible for (even predestined to) their predicament.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“Ordinaries, that church law was above the reach of the secular authorities. He was now an outsider, still officially secretary”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“There arose in the aftermath of this battle the strangest and most beautiful legend of the war. It was said that, when the British peril was at its height, a majestic figure had appeared high in the sky with arm upraised. Some said it had been pointing to victory, others that it held back the Germans as the Tommies got away. It came to be known as the Angel of Mons. Even more colorful was the simultaneous legend of the Archers of Agincourt. In the late Middle Ages at Agincourt—not a great distance from Mons—English yeomen armed with longbows had won a great victory over a much bigger force of mounted and armored French knights. Four hundred and ninety-nine years later there were stories of German soldiers found dead at Mons with arrows through their bodies.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“from 1550 to 1650, a century that encompassed the careers of Shakespeare and other writers of gigantic stature, Calvin was England’s most published author.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“The deletion of an apostrophe and a single letter turned “Jane’s” into “Jane,” and the words “and her” were inserted immediately thereafter. Now the crown was to pass not to the male heirs of Jane Grey but to “the Lady Jane and her heirs masles.” (Edward was of course highly literate, but spelling was a kind of free-form creative art in the sixteenth century”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“But of course he was also human, which is to say he was limited, and among his limitations was a blindness of a kind that is perhaps not all that unusual among extraordinary men of a certain type. Often right about important things, he was inclined to think himself always right about everything.”
― G.J. Meyer, The World Remade: America in World War I

“Hence one of the defining characteristics of Calvinism (and the Puritanism to which it gave rise in England): a zealous commitment to making the world a fully realized part of Christ’s kingdom. Curiously, people who believed they could do nothing to alter their eternal destinies nevertheless dedicated themselves to making everyone in the world conduct themselves in a holy manner as Calvin defined holiness. This was a matter of duty, and its aim was not to save souls but to protect the elect from the doomed.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“Salt was expensive, however, and so was used only with varieties of fish and meat that had demonstrated a capacity for surviving the preservation process in a reasonably appetizing state and were therefore regarded as “worth their salt.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“Unprovable stories about her sexual encounters with a horse have come down to the twenty-first century.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“Europe’s leading humanist and scriptural scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman’s men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing—the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his first intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler’s exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“responsibilities but to securing the”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“Upon bullying and bribing his way to the throne at last, this towering but evil-tempered man, a great hater as well as a great patron of Michelangelo, made it one of his purposes to blacken the Borgia name. He had former associates of the Borgias tortured in the quest for blacking material. Though the results must have disappointed him keenly-employment by the Borgias turned out to be no guarantee that one had witnessed unspeakable things-the supply of gossip grew steadily all the same, at a pace that accelerated over time.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Borgias: The Hidden History

“(It takes some effort to grasp just how small the American government and its military were before the Great War. Fewer than twenty officers served on the Army General Staff in Washington. The planning staff was only half that size. And yet the War Department, together with the Post Office, accounted for well over half of the federal payroll.)”
― G.J. Meyer, The World Remade: America in World War I

“Almost everything they heard and read assured them that their glorious armies would soon be victorious, that their cause was a noble one, and that the enemy was wicked in ways rarely seen in history.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“his”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“Erasmus argued that the father of the Reformation was wrong—that man does have free will.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“Don Pedro Luis de Borja-Pierluigi Borgia to the Italians—was still in his mid-twenties when he became the first member of his family to be the most hated man in Rome. He did so not by behaving badly in any way of which a credible record has survived, but by carrying out an assignment that made him the enemy of some of the most badly behaved Romans of his time.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Borgias: The Hidden History

“The troops were cracking because they could not absorb what was happening to them, because they knew themselves to be utterly powerless (bravery had little survival value when one was on the receiving end of a bombardment), and because they had no confidence that the generals who had put them in danger knew what they were doing. Men whose courage was beyond challenge could and did break down if subjected to enough strain of this kind.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“The accepted version of his life story provides the world with something it apparently needs: the perfect example of papal decadence.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Borgias: The Hidden History

“He was rather statedly conservative in his religious beliefs-entirely comfortable with established dogma and no friend of theological or philosophical innovation-but he showed marked tolerance in dealing with those whose views were not as orthodox as his own, on one occasion making the lame joke that “the Lord requires not the death of the sinner, but rather that he pay and live.” Late in his career, when the Jews were being expelled from Spain, Rodrigo would annoy Ferdinand and Isabella by making the refugees welcome in Rome.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Borgias: The Hidden History

“The control and manipulation of information that all the warring nations had been practicing since August 1914 became more systematic, more sophisticated, and farther-reaching. It came to be an essential function of government.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“defensive.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“Angrily, even tearfully, he complained of the divisions within the clergy, where “some be too stiff in their old Mumpsimus, others be too busy and curious in their new Sumpsimus.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

“Even the rank and file were career soldiers for the most part, volunteers drawn mainly from Britain’s urban poor and working classes, more loyal to their regiments and to one another than to any sentimental notions of imperial glory, and ready to make a joke of anything.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“The dark legend of the Borgias, having taken root in Italy, found a wider audience when religious reformers went forth in search of evidence not just that non-Italian popes were a bad idea but that the papacy was an evil institution, illegitimate, and inherently corrupt.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Borgias: The Hidden History

“In fact, however, Calvin regarded predestination as logically inescapable but otherwise beyond human understanding and in practical terms not of great importance.”
― G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty