Thus the liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger.

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

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.

When did one man ever civilize a people?

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

History shows how feeble are barriers of paper.

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.

With the Germans, the sovereignty resided in the great assembly of the people.

A good lawyer is a bad Christian.

A terrible animal, indeed, is an unbridled woman.

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

Wealth brings strength, strength confidence.

The sword - the first, for a time the only force: the force of iron.

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

Thus again the Netherlands, for the first time since the fall of Rome, were united under one crown imperial. They had already been once united, in their slavery to Rome.

The gigantic Gaul derided the Roman soldiers as a band of pigmies.

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

Enthusiasm could not supply the place of experience.

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

Thus the liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger.

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

The rise of the Dutch Republic must ever be regarded as one of the leading events of modern times.

The whole territory of the Netherlands was girt with forests.

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

The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.

I'm not a trained singer at all. I've auditioned on occasion for proper musical theatre-type stuff, but I can't read music, and I wasn't particularly good at it.

Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.

Every time I see a piano, I have this urge to play it.

I've had my share of doing things that I really wish I hadn't done.

I play a female Indiana Jones, a professor who hunts down precious objects, like a bowl that belonged to the Buddha. They tailored the role to me: I wanted to be smart, funny, and to kick some ass.

In the first State of the Union of his second term, President Bush made clear to Americans tonight that he is not going to play the role of a lame duck President.

I had no connections, and the fashion world was a closed elite. So my mother made appointments for herself with three top Parisian makeup artists and spoke highly about me... she was my first publicist!

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

You take some creative license when you make a movie, and things can be a little bit different.

Performance is your reality. Forget everything else.

And we do talk a lot about my past and my impression of things and how it relates to what we're doing now. The Brady Bunch, in its heyday, was really the genesis of when TV started to become the force that it is today.

We can support Barack Obama because he's committed to putting America back to work with good jobs - and he proved it by saving the auto industry.

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

March is a month of considerable frustration it is so near spring and yet across a great deal of the country the weather is still so violent and changeable that outdoor activity in our yards seems light years away.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

For Westlife, the music will never stop as long as our fans are around inspiring us to keep on making beautiful music together.

You can't do business with a man who doesn't know the meaning of a contract. You can't do business with a firm who swears they'll do one thing one day and does just the opposite the next. You can't do business with a company who takes your goods on a cash basis and then pays you off in bum harmonicas.

My kids paid the price for my career. We can say it's for our family, but it almost never is. It's about us. It's just some of us can pretend better than others.

The goalkeeper is the lone eagle the man of mystery the last defender.

Take care, these Italians, full of failings, are neither you, nor me; they are your neighbors, the ones you meet on the staircase and whom you do not like to greet.

A good heavy book holds you down. Its an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

I think you're defined as a company by what you choose to do and what you choose not to do.