John Lothrop Motley Quotes

A third force, developing itself more slowly, becomes even more potent than the rest: the power of gold.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

Monuments! what are they? the very pyramids have forgotten their builders, or to whom they were dedicated. Deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great.

Local self-government…is the life-blood of liberty.

To the Calvinists, more than to any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England, and America are due.

Wealth brings strength, strength confidence.

Enthusiasm could not supply the place of experience.

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessities.

When did one man ever civilize a people?

History shows how feeble are barriers of paper.

A talent for repartee is one that increases with practice.

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the Netherlands.

A good lawyer is a bad Christian.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons into servitude.

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career.

Thus the whole country was broken into many shreds and patches of sovereignty.

A terrible animal, indeed, is an unbridled woman.

In Gaul were two orders, the nobility and the priesthood, while the people, says Caesar, were all slaves.

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

The splendid empire of Charles the Fifth was erected upon the grave of liberty.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.