Quotes from Terry Jones

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

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.

medieval monarchs was reassuringly downmarket. For example

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

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

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....

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!

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.

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

We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.

I've got a soft spot for Theatr Colwyn because my granddad used to run the Colwyn amateur dramatic society in the 1930s.

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.

Medieval learning was really advanced.

I don't think you need religion.

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...

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.

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

A newt?" "I got better.

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.

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.