University Of Cambridge Faculty

"The way Conway Morris goes about biting the hand that once fed him would make a shoal of piranha seem decorous."

"I am puzzled that Conway Morris apparently doesn't grasp the equally strong (and inevitable) personal preferences embedded in his own view of life."

"Life’s Solution builds a forceful case for the predictability of evolutionary outcomes, not in terms of genetic details but rather their broad phenotypic manifestations. The case rests on a remarkable compilation of examples of convergent evolution, in which two or more lineages have independently evolved similar structures and functions."

"Marriage is a desperate thing."

"Mr. Selden was a person whom no character can part flatter, or transmit in any expressions equal to his merit and virtue. He was of so stupendous learning in all kinds and in all languages, (as may appear in his excellent and transcendent writings,) that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant amongst books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and writing; yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability was such, that he would have been thought to have been bred in the best courts, but that his good nature, charity, and delight in doing good, and in communicating all he knew, exceeded that breeding. His style in all his writings seems harsh and sometimes obscure; which is not wholly to be imputed to the abstruse subjects of which he commonly treated, out of the paths trod by other men; but to a little undervaluing the beauty of a style, and too much propensity to the language of antiquity: but in his conversation he was the most dear discourser, and had the best faculty of making hard things easy, and presenting them to the understanding, of any man that hath been known. Mr. Hyde was wont to say, that he valued himself upon nothing more than upon having had Mr. Selden's acquaintance from the time he was very young; and held it with great delight as long as they were suffered to continue together in London; and he was very much troubled always when he heard him blamed, censured, and reproached, for staying in London, and in the parliament, after they were in rebellion, and in the worst times, which his age obliged him to do; and how wicked soever the actions were which were every day done, he was confident he had not given his consent to them; but would have hindered them if he could with his own safety, to which he was always enough indulgent. If he had some infirmities with other men, they were weighed down with wonderful and prodigious abilities and excellencies in the other scale."

"A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness' sake. Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat."

"Preachers say, Do as I say, not as I do."

"Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain."

"Wise men say nothing in dangerous times."

"Never tell your resolution beforehand."

"The law against witches does not prove there be any; but it punishes the malice of those people that use such means to take away men's lives."

"Never king dropped out of the clouds."

"Syllables govern the world."

"They that govern the most make the least noise."

"Thou little thinkest what a little foolery governs the world."

"Of all actions of a man's life his marriage does least concern other people, yet of all actions of our life 'tis most meddled with by other people."

"Philosophy is nothing but discretion."

"Take a straw and throw it up into the air — you may see by that which way the wind is."

"Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak."

"Wit and wisdom are born with a man."

"No man is the wiser for his learning."

"The parish makes the constable, and when the constable is made he governs the parish."

"Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him."

"Gentelmen heve ever been more temperate in their religion than common people, as having more reason."

"Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. 'T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a "foot" a Chancellor's foot; what an uncertain measure would this be! One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot. 'T is the same thing in the Chancellor's conscience."

"Commonly we say a judgement falls upon a man for something in him we cannot abide."

"'Tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess."

"Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice; and yet everybody is content to hear."

"Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet."

"The House of Commons is called the Lower House, in twenty Acts of Parliament; but what are twenty Acts of Parliament amongst Friends?"

"Scrutamini scripturas (Let us look at the scriptures). These two words have undone the world."

"You will want a book which contains not man's thoughts, but God's — not a book that may amuse you, but a book that can save you — not even a book that can instruct you, but a book on which you can venture an eternity — not only a book which can give relief to your spirit, but redemption to your soul — a book which contains salvation, and conveys it to you, one which shall at once be the Saviour's book and the sinner's."

"It is perhaps in the sphere of political institutions that the English have been most original in their native invention, from the time of Magna Charta downwards, or even from the time of William the Conqueror. Certainly it is in politics that the world at large has borrowed most from us; for our literature, though as great as the Greek or Latin, has had relatively little influence outside the English-speaking nations. In politics modern Italy, under Cavour, went to school in England, borrowing thence her constitutional monarchy and parliament. Yet even in the realm of political ideas, where we have taught more than we learned, how much we owed to Ancient Rome! The Conservative idea of respect for law and of the sovereign regal power was throughout our history sanctioned by the glamour of classical association hanging round the words Lex, Rex, Imperator. Our Plantagenet and our Tudor foundations were built on the Roman model. And no less in the realm of Liberal thought, the ideal of Roman Republican virtue, perpetuated in Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus, did as much to inspire Milton, Sidney, and the opponents of the Stuarts as the Old Testament itself."

"[I]t was he Bernard Pares] who first interested his friend G. M. Trevelyan in Garibaldi by giving him a copy of the Autobiography as a wedding present: surely one of the most momentous wedding presents in literary history."

"It is a wonderful evening, and the Master and Mrs Trevelyan take me for a walk down the limes and on to the Fellows' Garden beyond. George Trevelyan tells me that Gladstone told his father that they should always be grateful for living in the great age of Liberalism. "Other generations, my dear Trevelyan, will be less fortunate." But who could have conceived that any generation would suffer as we have done?"

"A prize I got for good work at school was one of G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi books. This fascinated me, and soon I obtained the other two volumes of the series and studied the whole Garibaldi story in them carefully. Visions of similar deeds in India came before me, of a gallant fight for freedom, and in my mind India and Italy got strangely mixed together."

"His whole life was a celebration of English civilization. When he wrote about Europe – in just five of his twenty books – it was to write about Italy and how much more difficult and delayed was the coming of liberty to a country riddled with priestcraft and superstition. He was profoundly paternalistic in his social values; liberal in his racial values; progressive in his political values and intolerant in his religious attitudes (though less in later life)."

"As concerns the problems of foreign policy, I am paying Mr. Trevelyan the highest compliment which it is in my power to pay him, when I say that, looking at things from abroad, I find after all very little to criticize in his liberal and scrupulously judicial, though patriotic, treatment of this most difficult problem: the way in which he deals with the subject of the diplomatic and moral relations between England and the United States deserves special commendation. In so far as foreign politics bring England into contact and occasional conflict with the outer world, British History becomes merged in World History; and here again we find Mr. Trevelyan, thanks to the liberal and philosophic turn of his mind, equal to the task. His survey of Napoleon the Third's policy, and his characterisation of the Prussian Bismarckian régime are masterpieces of quiet and high-minded impartiality."

"Narrative technique was the natural vehicle for such influential historians of the two eras as G. M. Trevelyan and Basil Williams, yet whatever their other professional gifts it is now impossible to examine their narratives without a mounting sense of frustration at the shallowness, the superficiality and glibness of much of their writing, their willingness to skate over ignorance with a commonly received form of words, and to evade important problems with a well-turned generalisation."

"The Garibaldi trilogy established him as the best-selling historian of his generation, and by the outbreak of the Second World War, England Under the Stuarts was in its seventeenth edition. By 1949 British History in the Nineteenth Century had sold 68,000 copies and the History of England 200,000. But even these astonishing figures were eclipsed by the English Social History. Within a year, it had sold 100,000 copies, and by the early 1950s sales had exceeded half a million. There had been nothing like it since Macaulay – a precedent of which Trevelyan was well and happily aware. Nor do these statistics give any accurate impression of the total audience that Trevelyan reached: for many of his books were bought by libraries and used in schools and must have been read many times over. The tributes paid him in later years – that he had done more to promote interest in history than any other man alive – were wholly deserved."

"In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves, without foreign participation or example, a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, clean contrary to the prevailing tendencies on the continent, which was moving fast toward regal absolution, centralized bureaucracy, and the subjection of the individual to the State."

"She regarded it as a first charge of her slender war-budget to see that French and Dutch independence were maintained against Philip. This was secured, partly by English help and by the holding of the seas, and partly by domestic alliance of the Calvinists with Catholic politiques averse to Spanish domination; it followed that an element of liberality and toleration very rare in the Europe of that day made itself felt in France and in Holland in a manner agreeable to Elizabeth's eclectic spirit."

"The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed.... A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large."

"Their demands were limited and practical, and for that reason they successfully initiated a movement that led in the end to yet undreamt-of liberties for all."

"One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. ...the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon... It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. ...it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits."

"Against Machiavelli's princely interpretation of the new nationalism, Britain alone of the great national States successfully held out, turned back the tide of despotism, and elaborated a system by which a debating club of elected persons could successfully govern an Empire in peace and in war."

"The era when London awoke to find herself the maritime centre of the suddenly expanded globe, was also the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation - movements of intellectual growth and individual self-assertion which proved more congenial to the British than to many other races, and seemed to emancipate the island genius."

"[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."

"In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!"

"If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt."