Terry Jones Quotes

What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.

Sarah: That's not fair! Jareth: You say that so often, I wonder what your basis for comparison is?

Short or long to Goblin City? The straight way's short But the long way's pretty...

A newt?" "I got better.

The Goths didn't destroy Rome, nor did they massacre the population. On the contrary, the Barbarians took particular care to provide safe-houses for civilians and not to harm public buildings.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all' and 'To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.' 24

Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.

Poetry was alive and dangerous.

The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications ‘the Middle Ages’ thus constitute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world. BRIAN STOCK, Listening for the text

Every word is a gem… it’s only the order they’re put in that worries me —Terry Jones

It was the association of Celtic women with barbarism that persuaded the Senate to decree in AD 40 that prostitutes should make their hair blonde – the colour the Romans associated with the Celts. It was the eroticism, how-ever, that persuaded ladies at the highest level of Roman society to put on blonde wigs.

Oddly, none of the chroniclers who describe this 'sack of Rome' seem at all interested in the fact that what was being taken had actually been brought to the city as loot in the first place. And whereas the Romans had destroyed the places from which they took their plunder, not a single building in Rome was destroyed by the Vandals.

One of the most influential imports that Europeans brought back from the crusades was the humble button. This transformed women’s fashion as clothes no longer had to be loose enough to be pulled over their heads. Fashionable women were able to emphasize their figures, combining tight corsetry with long, flowing skirts and sleeves. Femininity, of course, was also a weapon that could be used to control men, and the power of noblewomen in the game of courtly chivalry was greater than that of any man. The

People associated their emperor with a scale of horror fully comparable with Auschwitz – and perhaps worse. They.,were prepared to believe that living men and women nailed to posts,'•soaked in oil and set on fire were used to light a party, because the public enjoyment of torture was part of the fabric of their state. Death screams were part of the fun.

world of elliptical allusions and allegory. And a lot of what they wrote was designed

Criminal law, in which the state detects the offence, takes the accused to court and demands and imposes punishment, simply did not exist in early medieval society.

They would also read and be read to – silent reading was regarded as highly suspect, a sign of being antisocial or melancholy, suitable only for scholars.

Trajan became commander of the world's largest army. It was a tradition for any new emperor to kick-start his reign with a little military adventure – and Trajan especially wasn't going to be left out. Kicking ass on the frontiers helped an emperor to stamp his authority on the Empire, built his reputation and kept the army busy. Besides, Trajan took 'delight in war'.19

Really entertaining and fun —John Cleese Much funnier than anything John Cleese has ever written —Terry Jones I know for a fact that John Cleese hasn't read it —Graham Chapman Who is John Cleese? —Eric Idle Really entertaining and fun —Michael Palin An American fan might have been forgiven for supposing that Douglas Adams, not Terry Gilliam, was the sixth member of the Python team.

The light of reason and civilization was virtually snuffed out by the Barbarian hordes who swarmed across Europe, annihilating everything the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the Renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art. It's a familiar story, but it's codswallop.

They agreed to pay 5000 lb of gold, 30,000 of silver, 3000 scarlet sheepskins (the Goths must have been a very well turned out army) and 3000 lb of pepper (they were already, of course, well seasoned).

[T]he incomparable Diana Wynne Jones, one of the finest mythic fiction writers of our age, who left us too early (due to cancer) two days ago. I'm so grateful to her for the extraordinary books she has left behind, which have inspired a whole generation of younger writers. She was writing brilliant YA fantasy before the genre (as we know it now) even existed; she was writing enchanting "wizard school" books long before Harry Potter was a gleam in Rowling's eye; and her knowledge of how to weave mythic/folkloric themes into contemporary fiction was second to no one's. Diana will be terribly missed, but through her magical stories, her light will stay on.

And then you rushed off afterward because of that business with the barber in Gleam Street.” “Sweeney Jones,” said Vimes. “Well, he was killing people, Sybil. The best you could say is that he didn’t mean to. He was just very bad at shaving—

Oddly enough, fear seems to have played a key role in the history of Rome, and despite the might and power of the Romans, there is something curiously desperate about their whole story. It's almost as if the grandeur of Rome was born of paranoia and desperation.

The Crusaders had not only taken into themselves the notion that they would become better people through violence; they also projected onto the victims of their violence their own inner demons. This is probably the most obvious and long-lasting heritage of the crusade. We still do it.

The world of the Druids had been destroyed and would not be revived. But the power of Rome was so much more brutal, more inhuman, more oppressive that it would not need an invasion to get rid of it. It withered because it was so hated by the people who had to endure it. And because most of them saw no point to it any more.

Terry Jones' Barbarians is about all those peoples whom the Romans wrote off as uncivilized, but it's also a chance to take a look at the Romans themselves from an alternative point of view – from the point of view of the people they trashed. And as such it fits into a thesis we've been banging on about in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives and in Terry's radio series The Anti-Renaissance Show. That thesis is that we've all been sold a false history of Rome that has twisted our entire understanding of our own history – glorifying (and glossing over) a long era of ruthless imperial power, celebrating it for the benefit of Renaissance tyrants and more modern empires, and wildly distorting our view of the so-called 'Middle Ages

In the United States medical treatment is the third highest cause of death (iatrogenic death) after cancer and heart disease. So, despite our undoubted progress in understanding the chemistry and biological structure of the body, and great advances in the techniques of medical intervention, we are not exceeding the achievements of medieval doctors as much as we might expect. In their terms we are doing worse, because the objective of their care was not necessarily to save the body (which would, of course, be wonderful) but to help save the soul by allowing patients to know the hour of their death, and prepare for it. This was itself a genuine medical skill and, again, one that depended on seeing the patient as a human being.

Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them – which is possible with peasants but socially taboo – so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep. The

Today we expect but one thing from our doctors: to make us better. The medieval doctor was trying to do a lot more than that. He was taking care of the soul as well as the body. Unlike modern doctors he did not try to stop a patient dying at all costs . . . rather, if death seemed inevitable, he was duty-bound to try and help him or her die in the best possible way for their immortal soul.

Lady Chesney was a tolerant soul. She tolerated the lowly people who jammed her sitting room at these meetings. She tolerated the off-the-peg clothes they wore. She tolerated their accents and the way they had to work for a living. She was even willing to shake hands with one or two of them, if they seemed important enough. Were any of them as grateful as they should have been? She doubted it.

Robbers of the world; having exhausted the land by their universal plunder, they rifle the deep. If their enemy is rich, they are rapacious; if he is poor, they lust for power; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. Robbery, slaughter and plunder they misname 'empire'; they make a wilderness and call it peace.45

But Decebalus was not one to be cowed easily, and still showed his spirit by taunting the Romans. As Trajan reached the Iron Gates, Decebalus sent him a warning inscribed rather surprisingly, according to Dio Cassius, on 'a large mushroom'. This was probably a mushroom-shaped dish used for ritual purposes, and sadly not the only instance in history of diplomatic correspondence by fungi. The inscription advised Trajan to turn back and 'keep the peace'.22

From 235, over a period of 50 years, 49 men were proclaimed emperor by different groups of soldiers. We know that at least 25 of them were killed, not counting the three who committed suicide and one who seems to have been struck by lightning. In fact, apart from Gothicus, only one of them is known to have died a natural death – Valerian, who held on to the job for seven years and was safely locked away as a prisoner of the Persians when he expired in 260.

WHO WERE THE BARBARIANS? Nobody ever called themselves 'barbarians'. It's not that sort of word. It's a word used about other people. In fact, it's a term of otherness. It had been used by the Ancient Greeks to describe non-Greek people whose language they couldn't understand and who therefore seemed to babble unintelligibly: 'Ba ba ba'. The same word, Barbara, appears in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, meaning 'stammering, gibbering' – in other words, alien. The Romans adopted the Greek word and used it to label (and usually libel) the peoples who surrounded their own world. Once the term had the might and majesty of Rome behind it, the Roman interpretation became the only one that counted, and the peoples whom they called Barbarians became forever branded – be they Spaniards, Britons, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Persians or Syrians. And of course 'barbarian' has become a by-word for the very opposite of everything we consider civilized. In contrast to the Romans, the Barbarians were lacking in refinement, primitive, ignorant, brutal, rapacious, destructive and cruel.

The story of the Lady of Shalott created an extraordinarily resonant echo in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination; Pre-Raphaelite artists, looking for images that expressed what they saw as a truly medieval perspective, returned to it time and time again. Tennyson provided them with the narrative, a story in which the lady is cursed only to see the world through a mirror. When she spies Lancelot she is smitten and looks directly at him: the mirror shatters and she is doomed. She sets out on a pathetic boat trip to Camelot, but by the time she arrives the curse has had its effect and she is dead. It is an image of womanhood as essentially confined and restricted; full participation in the world is forbidden and fatal. This is sentimentally regretted, but tragically unalterable. Tennyson was retelling a genuine medieval tale, but he transformed it utterly. In the original story the lady was not weak and helpless at all, and she was not under any curse. Nor was she passive and pathetic. She was a wilful, stubborn woman who boldly declared her passionate love for Lancelot. Her tragedy was that it was not returned. The story was retold in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the fifteenth century, and there too the Lady of Shalott was portrayed as a real, flesh and blood woman whose declaration of love was unashamed (‘Why should I leave such thoughts? Am I not an earthly woman?’) and who wrote to Lancelot as an equal. In fact, pretty well every time we find an apparently helpless woman in medieval literature she turns out to be not quite what we were looking for.

and to whose unsurpassable mastery of ballistics and biomass energetics we owe our third sun that now shines above us with its own famous on-off switch....

medieval monarchs was reassuringly downmarket. For example,

Will you still love me if a croc grabs me and I lose an arm or a leg?” “Yes, of course I would still love you,” I said. But there were many evenings when he would run through improbably scenarios, just checking to see how I really felt. One night he looked particularly concerned, his brow furrowed. “What’s up?” I asked. “Tell me why you married me.” I laughed. “Because you’re hot in the cot.” That broke the tension, and he laughed too. We both relaxed a little bit. But he would sometimes wonder if I’d married him just because I loved him, or if it was because he was a bit of Tarzan and Croc Dundee and Indiana Jones all rolled into one. “I’m in love with Steve Irwin,” I assured him, “and part of the reason I love you is because you are such a staunch advocate for wildlife. Your empathy and compassion for all animals is part of it too. But most of all, I know that destiny brought us together.” Steve continued our serious discussion, and he spoke of his mortality. He was convinced that he would never reach forty. That’s why he was in such a hurry all the time, to get as much done as he could. He didn’t feel sad about it. He only felt the motivation to make a difference before he was gone. “I’m not afraid of death,” he said. “I’m only afraid of dying. I don’t want to get sick and dwindle. I love working hard and playing hard and living hard, and making every moment count.” I learned so much from Steve. He helped me reevaluate my own purpose, my own life. What would happen if I didn’t make it to forty? What legacy would I leave?

This is where, in a cheap novel, the couple, confronted by imminent oblivion, would suddenly make passionate love." It was a pity Nettie was now as old as she was.

he was able to explain to the clergy that ‘Women are: “Satan’s bait, poison for men’s souls”.

Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them – which is possible with peasants but socially taboo – so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep.

Corky Jones, a boy shorter than Terry, but

Lucas had narrowed his lead threesome down to two competing groups: in one was Walken, Will Seltzer, and Terri Nunn, a trio Lucas described as “a little more serious, a little more realistic”; in the other, Ford, Hamill, and Fisher, a group Lucas called “a little more fun, more goofy.

If we purchased the land, the zoo would be enlarged from four acres to six. At the time, it seemed like an enormous step to take. We argued back and forth. We talked, dreamed, and planned. Steve always seemed to worry about the future. “If anything happens to me, promise that you’ll take care of the zoo.” “Of course I will,” I said. “That’s easy to promise, but nothing is going to happen to you. Don’t worry.” “Will you still love me if a croc grabs me and I lose an arm or a leg?” “Yes, of course I would still love you,” I said. But there were many evenings when he would run through improbably scenarios, just checking to see how I really felt. One night he looked particularly concerned, his brow furrowed. “What’s up?” I asked. “Tell me why you married me.” I laughed. “Because you’re hot in the cot.” That broke the tension, and he laughed too. We both relaxed a little bit. But he would sometimes wonder if I’d married him just because I loved him, or if it was because he was a bit of Tarzan and Croc Dundee and Indiana Jones all rolled into one. “I’m in love with Steve Irwin,” I assured him, “and part of the reason I love you is because you are such a staunch advocate for wildlife. Your empathy and compassion for all animals is part of it too. But most of all, I know that destiny brought us together.” Steve continued our serious discussion, and he spoke of his mortality. He was convinced that he would never reach forty. That’s why he was in such a hurry all the time, to get as much done as he could. He didn’t feel sad about it. He only felt the motivation to make a difference before he was gone. “I’m not afraid of death,” he said. “I’m only afraid of dying. I don’t want to get sick and dwindle. I love working hard and playing hard and living hard, and making every moment count.” I learned so much from Steve. He helped me reevaluate my own purpose, my own life. What would happen if I didn’t make it to forty? What legacy would I leave? That evening he was unusually contemplative. “None of our petty problems really matter,” he said. I agreed. “In a hundred years, what difference is it going to make, worrying about this two acres of land? We need to focus on the real change that will make the world a better place for our children and grandchildren.” Steve gave me a strange look. Children? We had never discussed having children much, because we were flat strapped. The thought of filming more documentaries, running the zoo, and raising a family was just too daunting. But that evening we did agree on one thing: We would spend some of my savings and make the leap to enlarge the zoo. We were both so happy with our decision. “We’re lucky that we met before I became the Crocodile Hunter,” he said. I knew what he was talking about. It made things a lot easier, a lot more clear-cut. I had fallen in love with Steve Irwin, not the guy on TV. “I don’t know how they do it,” he said. “Who?” I asked. “People in the limelight,” he said. “How do they tell who’s in it for them and who’s just after their celebrity? It puts a new slant on everything. Not for us, though,” he added. “Too right,” I agreed.

The situation was rather like that of the mid-twentieth century, when the old vaudeville comedians – with their distinctive repertoire of hand-me-down material culled from many years of touring music halls – found themselves displaced by the university-educated satirists of the television age who wrote their own fresh material every week.

These Temple members felt that they were exhibiting the proper socialist attitude, living the way everyone else should—and someday would, thanks to them. They were better than anyone else because they proved that everyone was equal. None had either the leisure time or the inclination to consider the contradiction. Observing with satisfaction what had literally become his kingdom, Jones observed to Terri Buford, “Keep them poor and keep them tired, and they’ll never leave.” How well he understood his people.

Brewing was often viewed as an appropriate activity for widows, who found it hard to farm land.

At the start of this book, we asked what the world would be like if, instead of suckling Romulus and Remus, the wolf had eaten them. What if there had been no Rome? What if there had been only Barbarians? After the disappearance of the last Roman emperor from the West, a Barbarian empire came into being that seems to answer that question. The Eastern Goths, the Ostrogoths, whose parents and grandparents had raided with Attila and his Huns, moved back to Italy in 489, and this time they stayed there. They were no longer pagans, but as self-aware Goths they avoided the Roman Catholic Church. Like the Vandals and the Visigoths, they were Arians, and under their king Theodoric they set about building a new kind of Rome. In place of the old violent, intolerant and ruthless Roman Catholic empire, there was a gentler and more inclusive Barbarian vision. Whereas Rome tried to make all its citizens ‘Romans’, and tried not to recognize nations within the Empire, Theodoric believed that it was possible to build an empire of different nationalities. He set out to establish harmony between the different kingdoms and peoples of the West, intermarrying his relatives to different royal families and guaranteeing them their own law codes. He ruled both as a Gothic king and as a patrician, paying respectful homage to Constantinople, but never calling himself emperor.

What sort of a transportation system d'you call this? The more popular it is the slower it goes!... 'You have to devise a system that goes faster the more popular it is, so it can cope! It's perfectly obvious!

The university had a new Managing Director, whose greatest achievement had been to change his title from 'The Principal' to 'The Managing Director'.

Trevor wondered if anyone in the outside world could even guess at the horror of working in the Planning Department

The statue at Alesia, over 20 feet tall, was erected in 1865 at the commission of Napoleon III, and the face appears to be modelled on his own. It is inscribed with Caesar's 'quotation' from Vercingetorix, slightly adapted – 'Gaul united, Forming a single nation, Inspired by a shared spirit, Can defy the world'. In 1870 Napoleon III led France to defeat by Germany.

This, of course, was back in the days when 'Caesar' wasn't a title – it was just a man's name, meaning, oddly enough, 'long-haired'. You know, like Barbarians. At all events, Burebista was sufficiently concerned about Caesar's ambitions to send a message to Caesar's arch-rival, Pompey, offering him military support in return

It was a tradition for any new emperor to kick-start his reign with a little military adventure – and Trajan especially wasn't going to be left out. Kicking ass on the frontiers helped an emperor to stamp his authority on the Empire, built his reputation and kept the army busy. Besides, Trajan took 'delight in war'.19 Decebalus

was the association of Celtic women with barbarism that persuaded the Senate to decree in AD 40 that prostitutes should make their hair blonde – the colour the Romans associated