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Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

We forget how bawdy and brutal the Middle Ages were.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

We in middle age require adventure.

I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.

If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.