Quotes & Sayings About Fortresses

Prudery is often immodestly modest; its habit is to multiply sentinels in proportion as the fortress is less threatened. — George D. Prentice

What a difference from words on a page, or images on a video screen. Surrounding him was one of the oldest fortresses in England, where men had died defending the walls, and something was happening. — Steve Berry

The Legend of the Dragon Fairytales cleanse and sanitise what were once true stories. In fairytales, knights are chivalrous, clean-shaven and wear shining armour - when in truth they were swarthy, filthy rapists and thugs. Castles are bright and gay when in truth they were grim fortresses. If dragons were real, then in all likelihood they were not graceful, high-chested, noble creatures; rather they would have been dirty, ugly, reptilian and mean. From: The Power of Myth by Craig Ferguson (Momentum, Sydney, 2013) — Matthew Reilly

The two fortresses which are the last to yield in the human heart, are hope and pride. — Lewis Howard Latimer

But I came to the government under circumstances calculated to generate peculiar acrimony. I found all its offices in the possession of a political sect who wished to transform it ultimately into the shape of their darling model the English government." The Republican victory of 1800, Jefferson said, "had blown all their designs, and they found themselves and their fortresses of power and profit put in a moment into the hands of other trustees. Lamentations and invective were all that remained to them." The — Jon Meacham

In scripture we are told of some trusting in God and others trusting in idols, and that God is our refuge, our strength, our defense. In this sense God is the rock of his people, and false Gods are called the rock of those that trust in them, Deut. xxxii. 4, 15, 18, 30, 31, 37. In the same sense the Gods of the King who shall do according to his will are called Mahuzzims, munitions, fortresses, protectors, guardians, or defenders. — Isaac Newton

Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers
not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native. — Wes Jackson

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing: our helper He amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing. — Martin Luther

To build refuges of my own making is to construct fortresses of sand at ocean's edge, where the relentless tides of time will leave my most magnificently constructed walls as perfectly flat sand. And now that I am subject to the very tides that destroyed these walls of mine, I am left with the reality that my single and sole refuge can only be the God who created both tides and sand. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Prepare your hearts as a fortress, for there will be no other. — Francisco Pizarro

A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction. — Zachary Mason

Geralt knew that bonnet and that feather, which were famed from the Buina to the Yaruga, known in manor houses, fortresses, inns, taverns and whorehouses. Particularly whorehouses. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past? — David Byrne

It's possible that aliens are
building blancmange fortresses on a distant planet millions of light
years away. It could be true even though we have no evidence it is happening. It's completely irrational to say it is not happening when you can't be at least reasonably sure. — Lewis N. Roe

It has been calculated that what with salvos, royal and military politeness, courteous exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and all ships of war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized world, discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six francs a shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred millions a year, which vanish in smoke. This is a mere details. All this time the poor were dying of hunger. — Victor Hugo

Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names. — Jan Morris

Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.
Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright
The coming pest with border fortresses,
Or catch your carp with subtle argument.
All force is twain in one: cause is not cause
Unless effect be there; and action's self
Must needs contain a passive. So command
Exists but with obedience. — George Eliot

The fortress of Europe with its frontiers must be held and will be held too, as long as is necessary. — Heinrich Himmler

To be sure, there are hunter-gatherer societies that don't exhibit the elaborately organized violence denoted by the term "war." But often what turns out to be lacking is the organization, not the violence. The warless !Kung San were billed in the title of one book as The Harmless People, yet during the 1950s and 1960s, their homicide rate was between 20 and 80 times as high as that found in industrialized nations.114 Eskimos, to judge by popular accounts, are all cuddliness and generosity. Yet early this century, after westerners first made contact with a fifteen-family Eskimo village, they found that every adult male had been involved in a homicide. One reason the !Kung and most Eskimo haven't waged war is their habitat.115 With population sparse, friction is low. But when densely settled along fertile ground, hunter-gatherers have warred lavishly. The Ainu of Japan built hilltop fortresses and, when raiding a neighboring — Robert Wright

[on chess]

He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it "the Russian game." Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights - an officer class - sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival. — Alan Furst

Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior according to the methods developed by animal and infant psychology. It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts, automatisms and unconscious reactions. But it has told us nothing about the reflexes that have built cathedrals, railroads, and fortresses, the instincts that have produced philosophies, poems, and legal systems, the automatisms that have resulted in the growth and decline of empires, the unconscious reactions that are splitting atoms. — Ludwig Von Mises

Their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions), our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more draconian anti-immigration laws. And, in the name of — Naomi Klein

Fairytales cleanse and sanitise what were once true stories. In fairytales, knights are chivalrous, clean-shaven and wear shining armour - when in truth they were swarthy, filthy rapists and thugs. Castles are bright and gay when in truth they were grim fortresses. — Matthew Reilly

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated! — Charles Dickens

But with the Berlin, I was able to allow him to get near, but not quite near enough, and I knew where to draw the line with the fortresses I had set up. — Vladimir Kramnik

Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. — Hilary Mantel

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay. — Martin Amis

I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings. — Austin Grossman

I've learned of life this bitter truth
Hope not between the crumbling walls Of mankind's gratitude to find repose,
But rather,
Build within thy own soul
Fortresses! — Georgia Douglas Johnson

We hide behind our assumptions and preconceptions as if they were fortresses - shutting people out. I love to witness the fall of a preconception; the way it renders you naked — Karen Hitchcock

it is far better to earn the confidence of the people than to rely on fortresses. — Niccolo Machiavelli

But France's powerful armies, and a very large number of fortresses, ensure that the French Sovereign will possess the throne forever, and they do not have anything to fear now concerning internal wars or their neighbors invading France. — Frederick The Great

The Hungarian ministry begged the king earnestly to issue orders to all troops and commanders of fortresses in Hungary, enjoining fidelity to the Constitution, and obedience to the ministers of Hungary. — Lajos Kossuth

You are very fortunate to be assigned to duty at Fortress Monroe on Chesapeake Bay; it is just the season for soft shelled crabs, and hog fish have just come in, and they are the most delicious panfish you ever ate. — Winfield Scott

Therefore the best fortress is to be found in the love of the people, for although you may have fortresses they will not save you if you are hated by the people. — Niccolo Machiavelli

As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. — Audre Lorde

Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has. — Stanislaw Ulam

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat? — Peter Watts

Still like the Fortresses shakes? — Mark Mackey

Earth is our only citadel in the universe; but we have illogically built many more fortresses within this beautiful castle! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Watching the Dallas Cowboys perform, it is not difficult to believe that coach Tom Landry flew fourengines bombers during World War II. He was in B17 Flying Fortresses out of England, they say. His cautious, conservative approach to every situation and the complexity of the plays he sends in do seem to reflect the philosophy of a pilot trained to doggedly press on according to plans laid down before takeoff. I sometimes wonder how the Cowboys would have fared all this years had Tom flown fighters in combat situations which dictated continuously changing tactics. — Len Morgan

There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm. — Joseph Stalin

Where are the leaders?' Sapphique asked.
'In the fortresses,' the swan replied.
'And the poets?'
'Lost in dreams of other worlds.'
'And the craftsmen?'
'Forging machines to challenge the darkness.'
'And the Wise, who made the world?'
The swan lowered its black neck sadly.
'Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers. — Catherine Fisher

Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It's like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated. — Lynn Coady

Why did people circle one another, consumed with either fear or envy, when all the they were fearing or envying was illusion? Why did they build psychological fortresses and barriers around themselves that would take a Ph.D. in safe-cracking to get through, which even they could not penetrate from the inside? And once again I compared European society with Aboriginal. The one so archetypally paranoid, grasping, destructive, the other so sane. I didn't want ever to leave this desert. I knew that I would forget. — Robyn Davidson

But because it lay between those two countries, first it would be conquered and ruled by the Egyptians, and then the Babylonians would invade, so that the people who lived there were constantly being driven from one place to another. They built themselves towns and fortresses, to no avail. They were still not strong — E.H. Gombrich

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed. — Marcel Proust

The American classicist Edith Hamilton once described the great works of literature, the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages. — Edith Hamilton

Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends. — Gary Shteyngart

were Huguenots who abhorred the Church to which it belonged. That huge donjon, built by the Counts of Poitiers, was still a place of formidable strength; but Richelieu would soon be in power and the days of local autonomy and provincial fortresses were numbered. All unknowing the parson was riding into the last act of a sectarian war, into the prologue to a nationalist revolution. At — Aldous Huxley

None of them is a Hollywood style hero. They don't have any super-powers. They can't fly or slay dragons.

But they do defend our right to keep our eyes open.

They're very human humans, having built for themselves inner fortresses with their free spirits, deep reserves of courage, curiosity about the world and a thirst for the truth. — Christophe Deloire

Tiny as a sparrow, fierce as an eagle, Lisbeth Salander is one of the great Scandinavian avengers of our time, an angry bird catapulting into the fortresses of power and wiping smiles off the faces of smug, predatory pigs. — A.O. Scott

Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding
and not all from the government
than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues ... But there are plenty of innovative musicians ... who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies ... Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past? ... The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons. — David Byrne

How I want to see the mountains, rivers, sunshine, and ruined fortresses! Let the wind course over us until we become beautiful — Mian Mian

Building our homes as fortresses of righteousness for protection from the world takes constant labor and diligence. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

You Englishman, who have no right in this Kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Maid, that you quit your fortresses and return into your own country, or if not, I shall make such mayhem that the memory of it will be perpetual. - Joan of Arc — Susan Banfield