Roman clef Quotes

“It hadn’t always been this way, that’s a cliché, but it is a cliché for a reason. It’s not like anyone starts a relationship with nothing to say to the other person. No-one wants to feel like a complete stranger and live together because it’s easier than trying to remember who owns the copy of Almost Famous – which was mine by the way.”

“He looked along the line of children, exhibits A to C of his existence and heirs to the twisted throne of his corrupt genetics.”

“It was a sacrifice worthy of her and dreams are made to be killed.”

“He was a shadow of the man that once intimidated us out of our home, a shell of a human being, a fragment of a father.”

“Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)”

“Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where "bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.”

“The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church.”

“I remember when I was a kid, seven years old maybe eight, I had an Irish girl who was taking care of us. Stereotypically named Maureen, about nineteen years old or twenty years old. She came upon me one day with my soldiers all set-up having a battle. Romans against Celts. She said, "Who's going to win?" I said, "The Romans are going to win, Romans always beat the Celts." She said, "Oh, really? What language are they currently speaking in Italy?" She says, "Bear in mind, back at home, we're still speaking the Irish. Of course, Irish, Gaelic, is a Celtic language, and you'll note that it ain't dead yet.”

“The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.”