"Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical."

"There was a re-birth of public spirit. Gentlemen ceased to take bribes. Justice became incorruptible... It has been observed that up to about 1820 the laws passed by Parliament had almost all been for the protection of the privileged few against the many; after that time they are predominantly for the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privilege. Instead of the ferocious defence of property, a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed begins to inspire legislation. The old revolutionary doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind, which had set on fire the enthusiasm of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet, passed in a milder and more reasonable form into the general imagination of the age."

"Whether or no man might be made perfect, he certainly might be made better and happier than he is; and the conscious pursuit of that object became an accepted source of inspiration to politics and literature. With it went the conception that the necessary condition of the pursuit was freedom: set man free, let him have room to move and external conditions which do not starve or cramp him, and human nature of itself will strive to rise higher. This spirit shows itself in almost all the best English fiction of the period, from romantics like the Brontës, and realists, like George Eliot, to satirists, like Dickens and Thackeray. It had been utterly lacking in Fielding and Smollett, and even in Jane Austen. It shows itself in the immense increase of charitable institutions, of religious missions, of societies for the education of the people. There is no question of hypocrisy. To suppose there is, is the mere petulance of jealously. Shelley's or Gladstone's love of moral improvement was just as genuine as Falstaff's love of sack. But an age of moral earnestness seems in our own day to have been succeeded by an age of relaxation; and one can see in, for instance, such a book as Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians that the moral earnestness of Gladstone or Dr. Arnold is felt by the author to be a hateful quality and not easily to be forgiven."

"Meanwhile, it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England. The sense of security is almost everywhere diffused, in town and country alike, and it is in marked contrast to the sense of insecurity which prevailed even at the beginning of the present century. There are, of course, in most great cities some quarters of evil repute, in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. There is, perhaps, to be found a lingering and flickering tradition of the old sanctuaries and similar resorts. But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it."

"During the last half of the 19th century there was a marked fall in the crime rate with a substantial decrease in both crimes of dishonesty and violence, and in the illegitimacy rate, and the beginnings of a fall in the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse. It was a period of striking moral reform in personal behaviour which transformed Britain from being a violent, dishonest and addicted society into a peaceable, law-abiding, respectable and essentially moral realm that endured for much of the 20th century."

"British rates of recorded crime fell as markedly in the latter part of the 19th century as they have risen since. The overall incidence of serious offences recorded by the police in the 1890s was only about 60 per cent of what it had been in the 1850s and, given that the efficiency of the reporting and recording of crime was improving at the time, the real fall in the crime rate was probably far greater than that indicated by official statistics. Thus in 1900 Britain was not only a less violent and dishonest country than today, but also less violent and dishonest than it had been in the earlier part of the 19th century."

"The postulate that there was a link of some kind between the rise of the Sunday school and the original decline of deviance is reinforced by the geographical evidence as well as the aggregate changes over time. Wales, which historically had been one of the more violent and lawless parts of Britain, became in the later 19th century an especially peaceable and law-abiding place, characterised by temperance and a strict moral code."

"No one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilized...countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known. Moreover its particular type of Christianity laid a peculiarly direct emphasis upon conduct; for, though it recognized both grace and faith as essentials to salvation, it was in practice also very largely a doctrine of salvation by works. This type, which had come to dominate churchmen and nonconformists alike, may be called, using the term in a broad sense, evangelicalism... [I]t became after Queen Victoria's marriage practically the religion of the court, and gripped all ranks and conditions of society. After Melbourne's departure it inspired nearly every front-rank public man, save Palmerston, for four decades... [N]othing is more remarkable than the way in which evangelicalism in the broader sense overleaped sectarian barriers and pervaded men of all creeds... Even Disraeli, by nature as remote from it as Palmerston, paid every deference to it in politics, and conformed to all its externals in Hughenden church."

"One of the most impressive demonstrations of the increase in the law-abiding character of the English is the following table of the number of criminal commitments in the half century between 1841 and 1891. During this period serious offences decreased 60 per cent in volume, and 80 per cent relative to the increase of population. As can be seen, the really dramatic break in criminal commitments came in the decade 1851–1861. Police forces were first established all over England by the County and Borough Police Act of 1856."

"I don't think there has been a better time in our history. Better leaders than Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury? Braver thinkers than Mill, Ruskin, Faraday and the mighty Darwin? And, crucially, when was English literature ever more richly endowed with talent? From Hardy to Dickens, George Eliot to Mrs Gaskell, Tennyson to Browning, Arnold to Wilde, English poetry and prose was never so well served."

"They were also liberal virtues. By putting a premium on ordinary virtues attainable by ordinary people, the ethos located responsibility within each individual. It was no longer only the exceptional, the heroic individual who was the master of his fate; every individual could be his own master. So far from promoting social control, the ethos had the effect of promoting self-control. This was at the heart of Victorian morality: self-control, self-help, self-reliance, self-discipline. A liberal society, the Victorians believed, depended upon a moral citizenry. The stronger the voluntary exercise of morality on the part of each individual—the more internalized that morality—the weaker need be the external, coercive instruments of the state. For the Victorians, morality served as a substitute for law, just as law was a substitute for force."

"Britain under Queen Victoria was Europe's most successful polity since the early Roman Empire. In just 70 years it discovered and bequeathed to us a complete rail network, internal combustion engines, gas and electricity, wireless telegraphy, anaesthetics, public sanitation, mass education, worker protection, full employment, imperial security and democracy."

"The bettering of conditions of life for the majority of people was the material achievement of the Victorian age, parallel to its glories in literature, intellect and science."

"The colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and the acquisition of South Africa in the decline of Holland, created the new and wider British Empire still based upon sea-power and comprising a fifth of the human race, over which Queen Victoria, in the longest reign of British history, presided. In this period moral issues arising from Christian ethics became prominent. The slave trade, from which Britain had so shamelessly profited in the past, was suppressed by the Royal Navy. By a terrible internal struggle, at the cost of nearly a million lives, slavery was extirpated from the United States; above all, the Union was preserved."

"[T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind."

"The Victorian Age was in its essence liberal, a time of continuous progress in humanity, in enlightenment, in the welfare of the masses; a time in which an aristocracy was, on the whole, in power but was continually resigning its privileges or extending them to classes hitherto excluded. The statesmen of that time thought of themselves not as leaders of a class, but rather as ‘Shepherds of the People’, concerned with the good of the flock but somewhat aloof from it."

"Audrey Russell: Do you think that there may be a reversal and that certain very strict standards may suddenly follow the present age? Mary Stocks: Well it could happen. You see, it did in the first half of the nineteenth century, didn't it? When there was a reaction against the sort of extreme libertarianism of the late eighteenth century."

"When I speak of Victorian values, I mean respect for the individual, thrift, initiative, a sense of personal responsibility, respect for others and their property, and all the other values that characterised the best of the Victorian era."

"No class in the community has more reason to be satisfied with the results of the last sixty years than the working men. Into that period have been crowded a series of economic changes, on the whole making for their comfort, and of reforms which have made them the envy of the same classes in other countries. They have got their "Six Points," or something better. It was the utmost demand of their best friends at the beginning of the present reign that they should be free to work out, by combination or otherwise, in their own way, their salvation, that their societies should be legalized, and that the criminal law should not be used to increase the power of capital—in a word, that they should suffer from no disabilities. They find themselves in 1897 in the position of a privileged or favoured class, fenced about with special legislation, and possessed of some rights denied to others. And this period has also been for them one of unexampled material prosperity. Their wages have risen, while the prices of food and most articles of consumption have fallen. The State educates their children gratis. The State makes the acquisition of allotments easy for them. The municipalities give them recreation-grounds and free libraries."

"What brighter jewel in a Sovereign's crown, what nobler record of a reign, than the fact that it witnessed the children's emancipation, that it released from toil in tender years the sons and daughters of the poor? The success of the Factory Acts has suggested other measures intended to make less oppressive the labour of those who, being, it is supposed, unable to bargain for themselves, need the protection of the Legislature; and this group of laws will be an enduring monument, if not of the wisdom of the Victorian age, of its solicitude for the welfare of its wards."

"The Fifteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and ratified during the Reconstruction Era, when the progressive wing of the Republican Party dominated Congress during the decade following the end of the U.S. Civil War. The Reconstruction era was noteworthy in that African American men were not only granted voting rights but even won several seats in Congress. Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce became the first African Americans to be elected to the U.S. Senate, representing the state of Mississippi. After their terms in office the next Black person elected to the Senate was Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, nearly a century later in 1967. When Reconstruction collapsed with the withdrawal of Federal troops from the former Confederate states in 1877, the white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party dominated the South. Voting rights for Black men in the former Confederate states were rescinded in courts and in state and local laws, and those rights were further restricted by poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and fraud. The infamous “grandfather clause,” which restricted voting rights to men who were allowed to vote, or whose male ancestors were allowed to vote, before 1867 was also a popular method of disenfranchising African American men - because they were not allowed to vote before the 15th Amendment was ratified, the grandfather clause denied them their voting rights."

"White Democrats opposed Reconstruction not because it was a failure, but because it was working. Today almost all historians of Reconstruction hold that view."

"As Reconstruction progressed, resistance grew to Republican attempts to assist freed slaves to attain full citizenship and economic opportunities. Many Southern whites resisted such efforts politically with membership in the Democratic Party and violently through groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. As Democrats gradually regained control of Southern state governments, Douglass advised blacks to remain loyal to the party of Lincoln because ‘the Republican party is the deck, all outside is the sea.’"

"But Booth’s assassination of Lincoln was also part of a larger plot to throw the North into chaos. Thus the killing could be called equal parts terrorism and tyrannicide. What is clear is that Lincoln died a martyr to many Northerners and that his death complicated efforts to heal the Union. What followed has become known as Reconstruction, the period from 1865 to 1877 during which Northern Republicans, driven by anger over Lincoln’s assassination and the need to make wartime sacrifices meaningful, sought to “reconstruct” the South as an egalitarian society. Among historians, it is now commonly understood as nothing less than a revolution. Therefore the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists was essentially a counterrevolution, one of the best historical examples of terrorism used in a fundamentally “conservative” cause, that is, with the goal of halting radical change. Most disturbingly, Reconstruction-era terrorism helped facilitate its perpetrators’ victory."

"This much is certain. If the present Democratic leadership is right, then Calhoun and Jefferson Davis were wrong. If the present Democratic leadership is right, then Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were right, and Lee, Forrest, and Wade Hampton were wrong. If the President’s civil-rights program is right, then reconstruction was right. If this program is right, the carpetbaggers were right."

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."

"It should, however, already be clear that the building of an independent force is necessary; that Black Power is necessary. If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it, and that is precisely the lesson of the Reconstruction era. Black people were allowed to register, to vote and to participate in politics, because it was to the advantage of powerful white “allies” to permit this. But at all times such advances flowed from white decisions. That era of black participation in politics was ended by another set of white decisions. There was no powerful independent political base in the southern black community to challenge the curtailment of political rights. At this point in the struggle, black people have no assurance—save a kind of idiot optimism and faith in a society whose history is one of racism— that if it became necessary, even the painfully limited gains thrown to the by the Congress would not be revoked as soon as a shift in political sentiments occurs."

"The Negro voter ... had, then, but one clear economic ideal and that was his demand for land, his demand that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right. This was a perfectly fair and natural demand and ought to have been an integral part of Emancipation. To emancipate four million laborers whose labor had been owned, and separate them from the land upon which they had worked for nearly two and a half centuries, was an operation such as no modern country had for a moment attempted or contemplated. The German and English and French serf, the Italian and Russian serf, were, on emancipation, given definite rights in the land. Only the American Negro slave was emancipated without such rights and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of slavery."

"Olga Soffer's research with her colleagues James Adovasio and David Hyland has been instrumental in providing a more holistic understanding of the past by, as we say in archaeology, making the invisible visible. Their work has shed light on the existence of a complex textile technology thousands of years before we thought possible. By extension, their research on textiles, in conjunction with research on ceramic technology (also Olga's work!), and on the production of beads, flutes, sculptures and cave paintings all of which date back 25,000 to 35,0000 or even 40,000 years ago illuminate the lives of all Ice Age peoples. I always tell my students that life in Ice Age Europe would have been demanding and you couldn't have afforded to have 50% of the population not contributing to the economic, political and social well-being of their communities. This isn't a politically correct revisionist view of prehistory but rather an attempt to be more scientific."

"I would be thrilled if palaeontologists discovered compelling evidence that tyrannosaurs were social hunters. A trackway preserving the footsteps of several individuals moving in the same direction at the same time would be excellent. But until then, tableaus of tyrannosaur families dining together must remain tantalisingly speculative parts of prehistory."

"It is important because when highly respected journals such as Nature use terms such as "Prehistoric Pin-up" and "35,000 year old sex object" and archaeologists from prestigious universities describe the figurine as "sexually exaggerated to the point of being pornographic" their voices carry weight and authority. This allows journalists and other researchers — particularly evolutionary psychologists — to use this interpretation of archaeological evidence to legitimize and naturalize contemporary western values and behaviors by tracing them back into the "mists of prehistory." In other words, we look at the way gender and gender relations are constructed today in our own (Western) society and we believe that good, bad or otherwise this is the way they have always been and will always be — that this particular way of organizing ourselves makes "evolutionary sense" and here is the scientific evidence to prove that — instead of allowing ourselves to imagine and to investigate whether there have been other ways of organizing ourselves as people and to recognize that the present is very much the result of particular historical and social circumstances."

"The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation."

"But the most remarkable thing about prehistoric naturalism is not that it is older than the geometric style, which makes so much more of a primitive impression, but that it already reveals all the typical phases of development through which art has passed in modern times and is not in any sense the merely instinctive, static, a-historical phenomenon which scholars obsessed with geometric and rigorously formal art declare it to be. This is an art which advances from a linear faithfulness to nature, in which individual forms are still shaped somewhat rigidly and laboriously, to a more nimble and sparkling, almost impressionistic technique."

"Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody — not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms — had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion."

"Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation."

"I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living."

"The capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual's identification with a group. The people who stood up best in the Nazi concentration camps were those who felt themselves members of a compact party (the Communists), of a church (priests and ministers), or of a close-knit national group. The individualists, whatever their nationality, caved in. The Western European Jew proved to be the most defenseless. Spurned by the Gentiles (even those within the concentration camps), and without vital ties with a Jewish community, he faced his tormentors alone—forsaken by the whole of humanity. One realizes now that the Ghetto of the Middle Ages was for the Jews more a fortress than a prison. Without the sense of utmost unity and distinctness which the ghetto imposed upon them, they could not have endured with unbroken spirit the violence and abuse of those dark centuries. When the Middle Ages returned for a brief decade in our day, they caught the Jew without his ancient defenses and crushed him."

"I have chosen the middle ages because, in spite of many diversities, they have a certain great stamp of unity, and, above all, of simplicity. The Englishman of the twelfth century had much more in common with the Frenchman and the German of his day than is the case now. They were all one in one faith, and all acknowledged one supreme spiritual head. The papal court was a common meeting place for the best intellects from all lands. There was one common language for all formal interchange of thought. There was one great system which separated all Europe into classes, and made all the members of a given class akin. A nation... had little influence on its neighbour, mingled seldom in that neighbour's quarrels."

"[E]normous activity, the new spirit... had come... through the Renaissance. ...[A] new authority appeared... independent of Christian religion or philosophy or... the Church, the authority of experience, of the empirical fact. One may trace this... into the philosophy of Occam and Duns Scotus, but it became a vital force... only from the sixteenth century onward. Galileo did not only think about... the pendulum and the falling stone, he tried out by experiments, quantitatively, how these motions took place. ...[E]mphasis on experience was connected with a slow and gradual change in the aspect of reality. While in the Middle Ages... the symbolic meaning of a thing was... its primary reality, the aspect of reality changed... What we can see and touch became primarily real. And this... could be connected with... experiment... [T]his... meant a departure... into an immense new field of... possibilities, and... the Church saw in the new movement the dangers rather than the hopes. ...[R]epresentatives of natural science could argue that experience offers an undisputable truth... made by nature or...in this sense, by God. ...[T]raditional religion ...could argue that... we lose the connection with the essential values... that part of reality beyond the material world. These two arguments do not meet and therefore the problem could not be settled by any... agreement or decision."

"The long period of the dark ages... is due... in a very considerable degree, to the celebacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that fitted... deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature, or to art... they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the Church. ...celibacy. ...thus, by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal... the Church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. ...as if she had aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be alone the parents of future generations. She practised the arts which breeders would use, who aimed at creating ferocious, currish, and stupid natures. ... The policy of the religious world in Europe... by means of persecutions... brought thousands of the foremost thinkers and men of political aptitudes to the scaffold, or imprisoned them during a large part of their manhood, or drove them as emigrants into other lands. ...Hence the Church, having first captured all the gentle natures and condemned them to celibacy, made another sweep of her huge nets ...to catch those who were the most fearless, truth-seeking, and intelligent ...and therefore the most suitable parents of a high civilization, and put a strong check, if not a direct stop, to their progeny. Those she reserved... to breed the generations of the future, were the servile, the indifferent, and again, the stupid. Thus, as she... brutalized human nature by her system of celibacy applied to the gentle, she demoralised it by her system of persecution of the intelligent, the sincere, and the free."

"The ancient and medieval theory can be called an "organismic" theory: it treated the motion of inanimate bodies (such as rocks) by analogy with the motions of animals. Just as... a dog... performs a certain motion... to obtain... meat, medieval mechanics assumed that a stone fell in order to reach its "natural place." ...Beyond the ring of fire... began the realm of celestial bodies or of [seven] planetary spheres, regarded as rotating. These celestial bodies consisted of a much more subtle matter than terrestrial bodies. To each... belonged a spirit, a kind of god. ...they consisted of a nonterrestrial material. ...described by some authors as crystalline spheres. ...they moved in a most perfect way—in permanent, uniform, circular motion. ...The eighth sphere [was] of the fixed stars... supposed to be fixed on... it. Beyond the eighth sphere was heaven. ...Eventually the idea of a "prime mover" or "" developed—that beyond the eighth sphere was a ninth which did not move itself, but which moved everything."

"Those who regard the Crusades, with indignation, as among the most extravagant episodes of the 'dark' Middle Ages, have not even the slightest suspicion that what they call 'religious fanaticism' was the visible sign of the presence and effectiveness of a sensitivity and decisiveness, the absence of which is more characteristic of true barbarism."

"It was the favourite amusement of the ladies of the castle to watch the sports and mock combats by which young men were trained, and they were often called on to declare the victor. Then the youths of two neighbouring castles would challenge each other, and gradually such contentions in prowess were held on a larger and larger scale, till they became almost battles; half the knights in the kingdom were engaged in them at once, and ladies sat in galleries ranged round to watch and encourage them, while the king himself on his throne, adjudged the prize, or threw down his staff to check the game if it became too dangerous. These jousts, or tournaments, were the chief delight of the middle ages, followed by feasts and dances, and by high honours to the most successful champion, who sometimes received his prize from the fairest of the ladies present, who was called the Queen of Beauty. Ladies were indeed of no small importance, according to the rules of chivalry. To win their favour was one of the chief objects held out to young knights, and discourtesy to them was one of the greatest offences that could be committed against the rules of the order. It was the part of the ladies to instruct the young pages in courteous manners, and also in their religious duties, and the lady of a castle stood in a far higher place of honour and confidence than women before these chivalrous days, except the few who raised themselves to eminence by their own deeds."

"In reality, the so called science of the middle ages is scarcely worthy of the name. Infinitely inferior as compared with modern science, it was still more crude, more distorted, more fantastic and illusory than that of ancient times. Medieval man had no clear-eyed perception of the visible world, actuality possessed for him little value, that which really is and happens was without special significance in his eyes. What the medieval man saw he interpreted as a symbol, what he heard he understood as an allegory. Dante himself is our best witness that cultivated men of his age esteemed the speculative life vastly superior to the practical."

"Medieval Islam was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than in contemporary Europe; it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical books are now known to us only through Arabic copies. It invented s, , sails and made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering and methods. In the middle-ages, the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe rather from Europe to Islam. Only after the 1500s did the net direction of flow begin to reverse."

"It is in effect impossible to draw any decided line between the periods of Ancient and Mediaeval history. We have chosen to commence the latter from the battle of Tours, because it was then that the kingdoms and manners of Europe began to assume somewhat of the form they retained during the middle ages."

"The Middle Ages as a whole and throughout their duration – with all the ambiguity of their chronological boundaries and of the very expression "Middle Ages" – prove to be an incomparable season of the culture of reason."

"Why do philosophers call aboutness "? ...[M]edieval philosophers ...coined the term, noting the similarity between such phenomena and the act of aiming an arrow at something (intendere arcum in). Intentional phenomena are equipped with metaphorical arrows... aimed at... whatever... the phenomena are about or refer to or allude to. But... many phenomena that exhibit this minimal... intentionality do not do anything intentionally... Perceptual states, emotional states, and states of memory... can be entirely involuntary or automatic responses... The medieval theorists noted that the arrow of intentionality could... be aimed at nothing... in a rather particular way. They called the object of your thought, real or not, the intentional object. ...Any intentional system is dependent on its... thinking about—perceiving, searching for, identifying, fearing, recalling—whatever... its "thoughts" are about. ...[T]he best way to confuse a particular intentional system is to exploit a flaw in its way(s) of perceiving or thinking ..[C]onfusing other intentional systems is a major goal in the life of most intentional systems. After all, one of the primary desires... is... for... food ...[and] to avoid becoming the food of another intentional system. ...But ...[t]here is no taking without the possibility of mistaking. That's why it's so important for ...theorists to ...identify and distinguish the ...varieties of taking (and mistaking) ...to have an accurate picture of ...capacities for distinguishing ..."thinking about" things."

"Although western-European society in the Middle Ages developed no general concept of progress, many important innovations were made. ...[M]edieval inventions included... spectacles for reading, the spinning wheel, stronger iron tools... the heavy ... es. Some of the most important innovations in the Middle Ages were connected with the use of the horse... A more efficient harness than the crude yoke, which had been so well suited for draft-oxen, was introduced about the ninth century. ...Alfred the Great noted, with apparent surprise, that horses were used for ploughing in Norway. This would have been impossible with the yoke-harness, because as soon as the horse begins to pull with it the neck-strap presses on the animal's windpipe and thus tends not only to restrict the flow of blood... but also to suffocate it! ...Previously, the horseshoe] had only been tied on... The first indisputable evidence of the use of nailed horseshoes goes back to the ninth century. ...[M]etal armour ...gave considerable impetus to the craft of the blacksmith. ...[T]he blacksmith was the forerunner of those who constructed the first mechanical clock. ...[T]he greatest of these, ...in the early fourteenth century ...was the son of a blacksmith."

"This volume, it is believed, contains all the most important tales which formed the great body of mediaeval legend or folk lore. ...for all who read them they must possess their old interest; and even over those who are unacquainted with the time-honoured romances, the heroes whose names they bear exercise in some faint measure the power of old associations. The wisdom of Merlin, the bravery of Bors and Guy, have almost passed into proverbs; and to not a few, probably, the name of Olger will bring up the image of the mighty Dane wrapped in the charmed slumber in which he lifts his mace once only in seven years. But a more potent spell is linked with the thought of Roland the brave and true, the peerless Paladin who fell on Roncesvalles. ...readers ...will obtain from it some adequate knowledge of the tales without having their attention and their patience overtaxed by a multiplicity of superfluous and therefore irksome details. Of the present version of the Arthur story, the most celebrated perhaps of all, it may be enough to say that it relates many important episodes which have been omitted in the versions recently published, while no attempt has been made to impart to the romance a more historical complexion than that which it received at the hands of Caxton's friend."