Edward Rutherfurd · 778 pages
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“The English Church, it was claimed, was Catholicism purified and reformed. And what was the nature of this reform? The truth was that nobody, least of all Henry himself, had much idea.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
“That was the trouble with being too highly born, Finbarr considered. The gods paid too much attention to you. It was ever thus in the Celtic world. Ravens would fly over the house to announce the death of a clan chief, swans would desert the lake. A king’s bad judgement could affect the weather. And if you were a prince, the druids made prophesies about you from before the day you were born; and after that, there was no escape.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
“The great festival of Lughnasa was held at Carmun once every three years. The site of Carmun was eerie. In a land of wild forest and bog, it was an open grassy space that stretched, green and empty, halfway to the horizon. Lying some distance west of the point where, if you were following it upstream, the Liffey’s course began to retreat eastwards on the way to its source in the Wicklow Mountains, the place was absolutely flat, except for some mounds in which ancestral chiefs were buried. The festival lasted a week. There were areas reserved for food and livestock markets, and another where fine clothes were sold; but the most important quarter was where a large racetrack was laid out on the bare turf.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
“In recent decades, Ireland in general and Dublin in particular, have been very fortunate in the quality of the historical attention they have received. During the extensive research required to write this book, I have been privileged to work with some of Ireland’s most distinguished scholars, who have generously shared their knowledge with me and corrected my texts. Their kind contributions are mentioned in the Acknowledgements. Thanks to the scholarly work of the last quarter century, there has been a reevaluation of certain aspects of Ireland’s history; and as a result, the story that follows may contain a number of surprises for many readers. I have provided a few additional notes in the Afterword at the end of this volume for those curious to know more.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
“In less than a month it would be the magical feast of Samhain. Some years this took place at the great ceremonial centre of Tara; other years it was held at other places. At Samhain the excess livestock would be slaughtered, the rest put out on the wasteland and later brought into pens, while the High King and his followers set off on their winter rounds. Until then, however, it was a slow and peaceful time. The harvest was in, the weather still warm. It should, for the High King, have been a time of contentment.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
“We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English?”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
“This Plantagenet king comes from the devil.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
“We have all been robbed of the land we have loved for a thousand years. Do you not see that, Welshman? Can you not imagine his rage? We were not even conquered. We were deceived.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from The Princes of Ireland
Edward Rutherfurd
Born place: in Salisbury, England, The United Kingdom
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“He welcomed challenges; they kept him sharp, showed that he was approachable, and oftentimes made him explore avenues previously unthought-of.”
― Christie Golden, quote from The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm
“common sense observations of human behavior support a similar dissociation in reasoning abilities which cuts in both directions. We all know persons who are exceedingly clever in their social navigation, who have an unerring sense of how to seek advantage for themselves and for their group, but who can be remarkably inept when trusted with a nonpersonal, nonsocial problem. The reverse condition is just as dramatic: We all know creative scientists and artists whose social sense is a disgrace, and who regularly harm themselves and others with their behavior. The absent-minded professor is the benign variety of the latter type. At work, in these different personality styles, are the presence or absence of what Howard Gardner has called “social intelligence,” or the presence or absence of one or the other of his multiple intelligences such as the “mathematical.”
― António R. Damásio, quote from Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
“In the words of Disraeli, “elected governments seldom govern” and the personages who controlled the strings are far different from the politicians the citizens elected. From that point on, God’s plan for mankind, social and economic interaction for the benefit of all was trashed. In its place arose a brutal structure that looted man of his substance, his possessions, his liberty and his freedom by the most hideously malicious acts of aggression through which mankind became utterly oppressed. The Christian teaching that man was created by God with a higher purpose, notably to serve Him, with a spiritual nature that made this possible, was destroyed by the interaction that started with Cain murdering Abel. Since that moment on, murder, whether it was an individual, (like the murder of Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking Committee for daring to expose the Federal Reserve Banking system) or mass murder, through wars such as the horrible First World War, became the instrument whereby these evil men enforced their rule. They mouthed pious platitudes and even put on an appearance of Christianity, but in their secret chambers and in their enclaves, they hurled invective at God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. Such is the nature of the beast with which we contend and with whom we are locked in battle in the year of our Lord, 2006. The “Elect” (and here I include the present U.S. administration in the hands of President G.W. Bush) does not believe that they are bound by Moral Law. While the “300” rule as they most assuredly do, man can never be secure in his person, his liberties and his property, witness the country of Iraq as one example.”
― quote from Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300
“We always blame the woman when a man falls in love, as though no man had the courage of his inclinations.”
― Samuel Taylor, quote from Sabrina Fair
“I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.”
― John Brunner, quote from The Shockwave Rider
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