Terry Jones Quotes

When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.

Beginning in the 11th century, a less-fragmented Europe began to take shape, and what we now call medieval culture - in which literature and learning made a noticeable rebound - spread through much of the territory Rome had once dominated.

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

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.

For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France.

Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.

Islam was Europe's teacher. From the eighth to the 12th centuries.

In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.

Dark Ages

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

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'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.

Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.

Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.

My education was interrupted only by my schooling.

Let us have "sweet girl graduates" by all means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the "golden hair" will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within.

Education is a slow moving but powerful force

Most people know nothing about learning; many despise it. Dummies reject as too hard whatever is not dumb.

Our higher education system is controlled by what amounts to a cartel of existing colleges and universities, which use their power over the accreditation process to block innovative, low-cost competitors from entering the market.

I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning, for that is sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He'll get better books afterwards.

The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.

The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.

Intellectuals ought to study the past not for the pleasure they find in so doing, but to derive lessons from it.

Education turns an empty mind into an open mind. It turns information into behavioural transformation

Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.