Lytton Strachey Quotes

Dark Ages

The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch 'dark.' Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.

No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.

It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.

I'm a bit of a history goon, and I love all that. Anything that's medieval-based up until, probably, the Tudor period and just after, I'm quite into.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

To deal with radicalism and extremism, we need to deal with economic inequality. This is what I learned from my experience in Solo and then in Jakarta.

If we have major geographic areas within our continent that have a tremendous lack of economic opportunity, we found that that is going to produce instability _ economic, political and social.

... the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France, before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last.

As things stand now the feudal lords are content to look on while the Shogunate carries on in a highhanded manner. Neither the lords nor the Shogun can be depended upon, and so our only hope lies in grass-roots heroes.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as The Dark Ages.

Were it not for Khrushchev’s execution of Stalin we wouldn’t have come to such a sorry state. Since then, we have lived increasingly useless and dirtier lives; this murder of Stalin was also the murder of his people. The country, deprived of high ideals in just a few decades, has run into the ground.

It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation .... A nation cannot be confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens.

I fear that some day or another we shall have in Europe a total upsetting of social order, which will drive all wise and experienced men to America.

The armed beggary of the nation.

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages.

In France … the Gentry who may possess Lands, live in good condition, though the Peasants are little better then Slaves, because they can possess nothing but at the will of others.

There has been a failure of leadership all over post colonial Africa to unite the country’s people.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

China still faces mountains of problems. Some are historical legacies. Others might be the byproducts of our rapid development…. We still have a long way to go. Maybe it’s even good for individuals or nations to have a certain sense of insecurity. This can turn into motivation to work hard.

What starts in the Middle East never stays in the Middle East..

The South is sinking deeper and more hopelessly into barbarism with every succeeding generation.

Abroad, technological change will create even more disruption as the wave of acceleration engulfs societies that have not yet come to terms with the social demands of industrialization, let alone more recent technological change. Mass disorientation can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism—aggression and terrorism made all the more devastating by access to weapons that are not only increasingly powerful but also deployable by ever smaller groups.

Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent.