Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.

— Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing the lives of underclasses... But he sees that they can be made to further his ambition.

— Stephen Greenblatt

Can honour set-to a leg?” Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.

— Stephen Greenblatt

No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?

— Stephen Greenblatt

What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”?

— Stephen Greenblatt

What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?

— Stephen Greenblatt

He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.

— Stephen Greenblatt

The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.

— Stephen Greenblatt

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?

— Stephen Greenblatt

If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

— Stephen Greenblatt

Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.

— Stephen Greenblatt

Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm?

— Stephen Greenblatt

It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.

— Stephen Greenblatt

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested.

— Stephen Greenblatt

The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines;.

— Stephen Greenblatt

The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.

— Stephen Greenblatt

In ordinary times, when a public figure is caught in a lie or simply reveals blatant ignorance of the truth, his standing is diminished. But these are not ordinary times. If a dispassionate bystander were to point out all of Cade’s grotesque distortions, mistakes, and downright lies, the crowd’s anger would light on the skeptic and not on Cade.

— Stephen Greenblatt

The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life.

— Stephen Greenblatt

Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?

— Stephen Greenblatt

Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.

— Stephen Greenblatt

Freedom here has nothing to do with political liberty, or a notion of rights, or the license to say whatever he wished, or the ability to go wherever he chose. It’s rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the wold, in which he himself was so ambitiously engaged. And in sphering himself in a space apart. For Poggio that experience was what it meant to immerse himself in ancient book. “I am free for reading.

— Stephen Greenblatt
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