Charles Clarke Quotes

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

I mean, I'm not a contrarian.

Since my high school years, I have been interested in history, especially in Roman history, a topic on which I have read rather extensively. The Latin that goes with this kind of interest proved useful when I had to generate a few terms and names for cell biology.

He was against it.

For us, when we think about the Middle Ages, it's sort of this rarefied, distant time that we have no connection to, especially if you grew up in America.

I actually only speak English and Latin. Medieval philosophy was my major, so we pretty much had to study in Latin.

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.

Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

To come to nothing through something is the way to outside from both sides.

There are bound to be deniers. Whenever you set up a thesis there's bound to be somebody who comes the opposite way …like Holocaust deniers.

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth

It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

If there's nobody in your way, you're not going anywhere.

In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.

Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?

Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.

I've done a bit of Latin in my time...but I can control it.

Jokes aside, let us turn to serious matters.

I flee who chases me and chase who flees me.

Bruno: We're not supposed to be friends, you and me. We're meant to be enemies. Did you know that?