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.

— Terry Jones

Terry Jones Quotes

Pinterest may have more travel intent data than any other site, so many people are pinning where they want to be.

— Terry Jones

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

— Terry Jones

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

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

Poetry was alive and dangerous.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— 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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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.

— Terry Jones

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
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