Eleanor Herman > Quotes

“Weakness, he has learned, isn't in the arm or the leg or the back. Weakness is in the mind.”
― Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings

“Questions are answered not when you want an answer but when the time for answers is right.”
― Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings

“Because sometimes it doesn’t help to chase after the thing you want. No. Sometimes you have to wait, however long it takes, until what you want most comes to you.”
― Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings

“Kat hates men like that, men who are too attractive for their own good-and know it.”
― Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings

“Divine grace, Caravaggio shows us, is not reserved for the rich and powerful, but falls equally on the poor and humble.”
― Eleanor Herman, The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul

“History offers us not a single recorded cell phone conversation between Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan in which His Most Christian Majesty wishes he were a tampon, or photos of Nell Gwynn sunbathing topless in her walled garden near Whitehall Palace. It is most certainly our loss.”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge

“Yet she (Princess Diana) suffered one ancient lament of many princess brides--- her husband didn't love her, hadn't wanted to marry her, rarely slept with her, and far prefered his mistress.”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics

“He rubs his forehead, frustrated, then raises his eyes, one dark brown, one gray-blue—the”
― Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings

“When the destiny of a nation is in a woman’s bedroom, the best place for the historian is in the antechamber. — CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge

“Maimonides likewise recommended immediate vomiting after consuming suspect food and praised rooster dung as one of the most effective means to bring this about. “It is said that excrements of roosters have a specific property to eliminate every poison by vomiting,” he proclaimed.”
― Eleanor Herman, The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul

“By the time Jefferson prepared to return to Virginia [from Paris], the lovely girl was 16. Here was a young woman who never could have emasculated him, never could have threatened him, never could have left him. She could not demand marriage from him, and make him break his promise to his late wife. A man could not marry his slave. Legally, she was required to do his bidding as long as she lived. Sally, for Jefferson, was the perfect solution.

And what about Sally? How did she feel about him? We know frustratingly little about her as a person. Her thoughts and feelings, her hopes and disappointments. And As an enslaved woman, she leaves us no portraits, no letters, no diaries... We have no idea when the affair began. Did he set out immediately to seduce the 14-year-old? ... Our only source of information is her son...”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House

“But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics

“Physicians recommended those suffering from hemorrhoids to stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man—a strangely unpalatable image to ponder.”
― Eleanor Herman, The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul

“The more I see of men,” she grumbled in one, “the more I love dogs.”50”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge

“When she got pregnant—he refused to wear a condom, perhaps for religious reasons—he sent her money for an abortion”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House – A Shocking History of Presidential Scandal, Power, and Character

“Alex looks around at Heph, at Diodotus, at handsome Telekles and round-faced Phrixos,”
― Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings

“To cure epilepsy, doctors concocted recipes of dried human heart or made a potion of wine, lily, lavender, and an entire adult brain, which weighed about three pounds. Human fat was used to treat consumption, rheumatism, and gout. Physicians recommended those suffering from hemorrhoids to stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man—a strangely unpalatable image to ponder.”
― Eleanor Herman, The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul

“Her legacy is that of a woman who refused to conform to the misogynistic traditions of her time.”
― Eleanor Herman, Mistress of the Vatican: The True Story of Olimpia Maidalchini: The Secret Female Pope

“Boring, religious, and intellectually limited, Marie Leczinska was called one of the two dullest queens in Europe by her own father, the other dull queen being his wife. Marie”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge

“Another method to identify misogyny is to picture a well-known politician as belonging to the opposite sex and see where that takes you. For instance, imagine Donald Trump as a woman. Let's call her Donna. During the 2016 presidential election, Donna Trump said the exact same things as her male twin, Donald, did in real life. Orange-faced, sporting a fantastically cantilevered helmet of yellow hair, she hid her weight under baggy, navy-blue pantsuits. Bellowing from the podium, she was angry, boastful. Only SHE could save the country. She called people nasty names, made fun of handicapped reporters and Gold Star Families, and refused to turn over her income tax returns. She lied and/or exaggerated on a daily basis. She had been married three times and cheated on all three husbands. She bragged about grabbing unsuspecting men's penises. Would Donna Trump have been viewed as blunt, honest, and refreshing? Would SHE have won the election?”
― Eleanor Herman, Off With Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power

“When Marguerite (Marguerite-Louise of France, Grand Duchess of Tuscany), caught malaria, she claimed the royal family of Tuscany was trying to murder her, but that she would, in fact, rather die than return to her husband. Louis XIV asked the pope to threaten excommunication if Marguerite persisted, and the pontiff sent her a harsh letter. She didn't fear hell, she replied she was already living in it.”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics

“O do not be born a woman, if you want your own way. —Lucrezia de’ Medici O”
― Eleanor Herman, Mistress of the Vatican: The True Story of Olimpia Maidalchini: The Secret Female Pope

“Astonishingly, the founding strain of Puritanism brought to Massachusetts by a few dozen bleak souls in 1620 exited until quite recently in the American character . . . despite the American reputation for prudery, many of our leaders have had a colorful sexual past.”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House

“In 1891, Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Fredrick Augustus, the heir to to the Saxon throne. The Prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later, disenchanted, she wrote in her memoirs, 'Although every princess doubtless at some time dreams an Ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries some one quite different from the hero of her girlhood's dreams.”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics

“The unattainable was most desireable. The already attained was dull.”
― Eleanor Herman, Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics

“In an election, if you are married, you are neglecting him; if you are single, you couldn’t get him; if you are divorced, you couldn’t keep him. If you’re widowed, you killed him. —Barbara Mikulski, US Senator from Maryland, 1987–2017”
― Eleanor Herman, Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power

“Hagnon fixes a value to everything. It occurs to Alexander that the man would probably sell his mother for an obol and consider it a deal.”
― Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings

“As the feminist author Kate Manne wrote in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, “When a woman competes for unprecedented high positions of male-dominated leadership or authority, particularly at the expense of an actual male rival, people tend to be biased in his favor, toward him. That is, there will be a general tendency, all else being equal, to be on his side, willing him to power, and this in turn predictably leads to biases against her. So when she speaks against or over him, by disagreeing with him, interrupting him, laughing at his expense, or declaring victory over him—it would be natural for her voice to be heard as grating, raspy, shrill, or otherwise painful sounding. We do not want to hear her say a word against him, so she becomes hard to listen to.”
― Eleanor Herman, Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power

“Over time, these writings of the early church fathers and the decrees of popes and church councils became accepted truth in the same way the Bible was.”
― Eleanor Herman, Mistress of the Vatican: The True Story of Olimpia Maidalchini: The Secret Female Pope

“A rich man, it is said, is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.”
― Eleanor Herman, Murder in the Garden of God: A True Story of Renaissance Ambition, Betrayal and Revenge