Top 50 Ian Mortimer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Lord Acton’s famous phrase: ’power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

— Ian Mortimer

2. “Guy de Chauliac’s advice to those wishing to avoid infection is as follows: ‘Go quickly, go far, and return slowly.”

— Ian Mortimer

3. “Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal – some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father’s estates, not the younger – so why should men and women be treated equally?”

— Ian Mortimer

4. “Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.”

— Ian Mortimer

5. “Oscar Wilde once quipped, “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything and the young know everything.”

— Ian Mortimer

6. “The man who has no knowledge of the past has no wisdom.”

— Ian Mortimer

7. “Justice is a relative concept in all ages. The fourteenth century is no exception.”

— Ian Mortimer

8. “W H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is – and always will be – ourselves.”

— Ian Mortimer

9. “Literature is a means to delight the mind and embolden the spirit.”

— Ian Mortimer

10. “It is better to eat the dog than be eaten by the dog’, Montagu had remarked quietly to the king, after being dismissed from Mortimer’s presence.”

— Ian Mortimer

11. “There’s so much beauty in the world, don’t close your eyes to it just because you’ve lost your own small patch of happiness.”

— Ian Mortimer

12. “All leaders who go to war in the name of God are either zealots or hypocrites.”

— Ian Mortimer

13. “History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past – to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.”

— Ian Mortimer

14. “The last day I was here, in eighteen forty-three, was the only time since the plague when we were not at war.”

— Ian Mortimer

15. “While the traditional image of knights in armour is accurate and widely accepted, the equally representative image of knights wearing corsets and suspender belts is perhaps less well known.”

— Ian Mortimer

16. “If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity, and not as the passing shapes that we may glimpse every day in a looking glass, which then are gone forever.”

— Ian Mortimer

17. “If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity.”

— Ian Mortimer

18. “All gentlemen of any rank with whom he holds conversations can speak Latin, French, Spanish or Italian. They are aware that the English language is only used in this island and would consider themselves uncivilized if they knew no other tongue than their own.”

— Ian Mortimer

19. “You might find it alarming to think that your doctor will not actually need to see you in person but might make a diagnosis based on the position of the stars, the colour and smell of your urine, and the taste of your blood.”

— Ian Mortimer

20. “Collectively they remind us that history is much more than an education process. Understanding the past is a matter of experience as well as knowledge, a striving to make spiritual, emotional, poetic, dramatic, and inspirational connections with our forebears.”

— Ian Mortimer

21. “In the modern world we understand that the greater the severity of a crime, the longer the punishment should be. In the medieval world the worse the crime, the more extreme the nature of the punishment.”

— Ian Mortimer

22. “W H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others.”

— Ian Mortimer

23. “The historian is always a middleman: the facilitator of the reader’s understanding of the past.”

— Ian Mortimer

24. “Practicalities take precedence over beauty and thus become ideals, or things of beauty, in themselves.”

— Ian Mortimer

25. “The London physician Simon Forman makes a list of seventy diseases that occur in women and not in men and states that they are a punishment for Eve tempting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit.”

— Ian Mortimer

26. “Women may not expose their arms or legs without being deemed to have acted lewdly.”

— Ian Mortimer

27. “Even steering a boat can be dangerous. In heavy seas it might take six or seven men to control the tiller of a very large vessel, and they have to do this below deck, without being able to see the sea and the sky. You will not find a ship’s wheel anywhere – it has not been invented yet.”

— Ian Mortimer

28. “At times it seems that medieval people pride themselves on the quantity of their knowledge, not its quality or correctness. Well-educated and intelligent individuals are fully aware of the shortcomings of this attitude.”

— Ian Mortimer

29. “The word which best sums up the medieval attitude to the Devil, miracles, and everything in between is “superstition.” People do not understand the laws of physics, the nature of matter, or even how the human body functions. Hence they do not see limitations on how the world operates.”

— Ian Mortimer

30. “In this new century, people are all divided and unsatisfied, hoping that God will smile on them personally.”

— Ian Mortimer

31. “Just as there is a violent streak running through the whole of society, so too there is a religious one.”

— Ian Mortimer

32. “There are times in life when the cycle of the ages and the destruction of one generation’s work by the next is an uplifting thing, for it promises the young so much. And there are times, later in life, when you realise that it means that your work too will be swept away. Honestly, the only way to secure everlasting fame is to produce such a fine work that no age will ever rival it.”

— Ian Mortimer

33. “But I do know this: no loss is absolute. There is always something left to live for.”

— Ian Mortimer

34. “Give a gang of such boys swords at the age of seventeen or eighteen, and give them a lot to drink and put them under the command of a man like Sir John Arundel – and the result is a tragedy.”

— Ian Mortimer

35. “Even a ship can be deemed guilty of murder and confiscated as a deodand, the proceeds of its sale being given to the king to be distributed as alms.”

— Ian Mortimer

36. “Daily language is direct and to the point. So if someone slaps you on the back in a hearty way and exclaims, “Your breeches and your very balls be blessed!” do not take it amiss. It is a compliment.”

— Ian Mortimer

37. “If it is a fish day you may be served sturgeon, porpoise, or seal.”

— Ian Mortimer

38. “The four centuries between the Norman invasion and the advent of printing see huge changes in society.”

— Ian Mortimer

39. “In any society as violent as this, it is vitally important to belong.”

— Ian Mortimer

40. “But in the sixteenth century some individuals do change the course of society.”

— Ian Mortimer

41. “The last few decades have seen so much change that people simply do not know what to believe or think anymore. They have become used to living with slow-burning crises that might, at any moment, flare up into life-threatening situations.”

— Ian Mortimer

42. “Just look through the rolls of patent letters at the number of men who are forgiven for murder; and look at the thousands of gallows throughout the country, which are never empty for long. Manners maketh Man, they say. Certainly the lack of them can unmake a man.”

— Ian Mortimer

43. “When you consider that societies with youthful populations are more violent, tend to be supportive of slavery, and see nothing wrong in holding brutal combats in which men fight to the death for the sake of entertainment, you realize that society has changed fundamentally.”

— Ian Mortimer

44. “It is so proud, so grand, and in places so beautiful and yet it displays all the disgusting features of a bloated glutton. The city as a body is a caricature of the human body: smelly, dirty, commanding, rich, and indulgent.”

— Ian Mortimer

45. “The village develops in line with the contours of necessity.”

— Ian Mortimer

46. “Many men regard their membership of a town community as no less important than their nationality.”

— Ian Mortimer

47. “The question is very much a sixteenth-century one. Prior to the Reformation there is no discussion about the existence of God. Not believing in God is like not believing in trees. Most people simply cannot conceive of a line dividing the metaphysical and the physical.”

— Ian Mortimer

48. “He might be a fighting machine, but when he removes his armor he is a man of sympathy and piety, and these virtues are as much a part of his character as his military prowess.”

— Ian Mortimer

49. “Yes, there is humor, lots of it, amid the violence and sexism. But whether you will find it funny is quite a different matter.”

— Ian Mortimer

50. “Seals, porpoises, dolphins, barnacle geese, puffins, and beavers are all classed as fish as their lives begin in the sea or in a river. Hence they are eaten gleefully, even on nonmeat days.”

— Ian Mortimer