Michael Dennis

“Is righteousness, then, something 'fickle and changeable'? No; but the periods of time over which it presides, do not all proceed alike; they are time. Men, however, whose life on earth is short, are unable to conceive with their own minds the reasoning processes of earlier generations and of other races whom they have not known for themselves, whereas in the generations they do know, they can easily see what is appropriate within one and the same body or day or house, to each lib or hour or part and person. They are scandalized by the past, and enslaved to the present”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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

“No sooner had the struggling soul escaped from the clay-cold body of Count Renaud, than his eldest son, Count Rhodophil, hastened to the library, and opening the secret cabinet, where his late father usually deposited his papers of consequence, after a strict examination of the contents, returned to the anti-chamber, on the floor of which lay extended his brother, the deeply-afflicted Ferdinand, just recovering from a fainting fit, and overwhelmed with inexpressible anguish.”
― Eliza Parsons, The Mysterious Warning

“Oh, how I wish -- and here Jane astonished herself with the vehemence of her own feelings -- how I wish that once, just once in my life, I could see Emma Woodhouse receive a real set-down!”
― Joan Aiken, Jane Fairfax