Michael Dennis

“It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the opposite or a different version. Women outnumbered men because men were killed off in the wars; men outnumbered women because women died in childbirth. Common people were familiar with the Bible; common people were unfamiliar with the Bible. Nobles were tax exempt; no, they were not tax exempt. French peasants were filthy and foul-smelling and lived on bread and onions; French peasants ate pork, fowl, and game and enjoyed baths in the village bathhouses. The list could be extended indefinitely.”
― Barbara Tuchman

“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little, we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep. In quiet eventless lives the changes internal and external are so small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“Men shut their doors against a setting sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

“It is according to this Law that the customs of different times and places are shaped to fit their time and place; but the Law itself is everywhere and always, not one thing in one place and another in another. It is according to this Law that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and all those who were praised by the mouth of God, were righteous. It is the naive who judge them unrighteous, judging them in accordance with their brief place in human time, and measuring the moral character of the human race from the direction of their own moral character.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions