Fair for Its Day/Quotes

"It was a time and place, compared to say, medieval France, or 18th-century Spain, or late 20th-century Iran of astounding diversity of religious views. Jew and gentile, Catholic and Protestant, Methodist and Anglican, Quaker and Baptist, and even the occasional Muslim, Druid, and atheist lived together with some mutual harassment, but, for the most part, without killing each other. It was no small achievement."

—Kirsten Olsen, Daily Life in Eighteenth Century England

"...every wanton and causeless restraint of the will of the subject, whether practised by a monarch, a nobility, or a popular assembly, is a degree of tyranny"

—Sir William Blackstone, Commentary on the Laws of England (1753)

"So," he burped, "the boy finally got frustrated and ordered his men to find him some outright slaves." Another burp. "Slaves can be treated any way their master chooses in any country."

(That was a lie. It was not true in most civilized realms, not in modern times. It was certainly not true under Roman law. But he did not think that Venandakatra would know otherwise. Slaves, and their legal rights, were far beneath the great lord's contempt. In any country-certainly in his own)

—Flavius Belisarius as a spy, using a drinking party to reinforce an ally's cover as a supposed Royal Brat, Belisarius Series

Also, judging great men by the standards of a much later time is a device of midgets on stilts, trying to piss on the heads of giants. You only make yourself small.

—Pursuing Liberty by Sarah A. Hoyt