Saxons Quotes & Sayings
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Top Saxons Quotes

When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds. — Nicolas Cage

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. — Jonathan Franzen

I see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a lonely cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see them enjoying lectures in beautiful halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like the Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. I see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls, and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When the boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and the stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills the soil. — Hamlin Garland

Yule is supposed to be a celebration and a consolation, a moment of warm brightness in the heart of winter, a time to eat because you know that the lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land, and a time to be happy and get drunk and behave irresponsibly and wake up the next morning wondering if you will ever feel well again, but the West Saxons handed the feast to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral. — Bernard Cornwell

Tell Ragnall," I told him, "that the Saxons of Mercia are coming. Tell him that his dead will number in the thousands. Tell him that his own death is just days away. Tell him that promise comes from Uhtred of Bebbanburg. — Bernard Cornwell

It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

America is a nation that lies to itself about who and what it is. It is a nation of minorities ruled by a minority of one-it thinks and acts as if it were a nation of white Anglo-Saxons and Protestants. — Harold Cruse

I felt that a lot of Viking culture had been caricatured and misconstrued. After all, they were far more democratic than the Saxons and the Francs, who were exercising really hierarchical social structures at that time. The Vikings had popular meetings where everything could be discussed. — Michael Hirst

Riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. — Cormac McCarthy

Pay attention," Gareth said to Moxie. "If it comes down to a choice of gettin' captured or killed by Saxons or brigands, dead is less bad, — Hank Quense

When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also.Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?
Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us
Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians
sprung from one head and made in one image. — Herman Melville

I had never thought it all through before, but suddenly, on that cold day, I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man's generosity. "You — Bernard Cornwell

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned. — James Fenton

Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything. — John Ralston Saul

By Woden, God of Saxons,
From whence comes Wensday, that is Wodensday,
Truth is a thing that ever I will keep
Unto thylke day in which I creep into
My sepulchre — William Cartwright

If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons, to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians; and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are able to find among them no such act of adoption; we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.
['Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law?', letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, from Monticello, February 10, 1814] — Thomas Jefferson

We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English? — Edward Rutherfurd

The members of the circle ... [were] performing a peculiar caper based on Mrs. Shawcross's fancy of what a Saxon dance might have seemed like. ("Did Saxons dance?" Pamela asked. "You never think of them dancing.") — Kate Atkinson

There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer and precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsbility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. — Friedrich Hayek

Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf
At various times, I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting. — Jorge Luis Borges

Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in The Omniconstant — Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis

The common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character existed. — Thomas Jefferson

The story is also about the battle between Arthur and the Saxons. The Saxons were destroying everything they came across and Arthur was left when Rome was falling because this movie takes place in 400 A.D. — Antoine Fuqua

As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake. — Maggie Stiefvater

British Israelites: The British Israelites believe the white Anglo-Saxons of Britain to be descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel deported by Sargon of Assyria on the fall of Sumeria in 721 B.C ... They further believe that the future can be foretold by the measurements of the Great Pyramid, which probably means it will be big and yellow and in the hand of the Arabs. They also believe that if you sleep with your head under the pillow a fairy will come and take all your teeth. — Mike Harding

I haven't seen so many Anglo Saxons in one place since the Republican Convention," I said. "You've never been to the Republican Convention," Susan said. — Robert B. Parker

Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that most of the native English culture they preserved is not in Latin, the language of the church, but in Old English, the language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. — Ronald Carter

Only people, especially Anglo-Saxons, are so afraid lest joyfulness may somehow be reprehensible that they will never admit it as a lawful and laudable end in itself. — Arnold Bennett

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans. — Henry David Thoreau

The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain ...
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done. — Robert Aickman

The relationship between the planets and the days Sun-day and Moon-day is obvious. As for the rest, the Saxon god Tiw is the same as the Roman war god Mars, hence we call it Tiw's-day, instead of Mars-day. The Saxon god Woden is the same as Mercury, and so we call it Woden's-day instead of Mercury-day. Thursday was named for the god Thor, rather than for Jupiter. And finally Friff (the wife of Woden) took the place of Venus for the Saxons, and so we have Friff-day, or Friday. — Benjamin Wiker

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. — Jonathan Franzen

It is a frequently cited fact that English has two sets of words for farm animals and their corresponding meats. The living animals are expressed with words of Germanic origin-calf (German 'Kalb'), swine (G. 'Schwein'), and ox (G. 'Ochse')-because the servants who guarded them were the conquered Anglo-Saxons. The names of the meats are of Romance origin-veal (French 'veau'), pork (F. 'porc') and beef (F. 'boeuf')-because those who enjoyed them were the conquering Norman masters. — Kato Lomb

This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table. — Patricia Highsmith

Italians tend to be less rigidly moral and law-abiding than do Anglo-Saxons. They also have a profound suspicion of the state and most of its agencies. — Donna Leon

Christians best thrive as a minority, a counterculture. Historically, when they reach a majority they too have yielded to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel. Charlemagne ordered a death penalty for all Saxons who would not convert, and in 1492 Spain decreed that all Jews convert to Christianity or be expelled. British Protestants in Ireland once imposed a stiff fine on anyone who did not attend church and deputies forcibly dragged Catholics into Protestant churches. Priests in the American West sometimes chained Indians to church pews to enforce church attendance. After many such episodes in Christendom it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Much of the current hostility against Christians evokes the memory of such examples. The blending of church and state may work for a time but it inevitably provokes a backlash, such as that seen in secular Europe today. — Philip Yancey

I've never considered breaking that oath before. Ever. But I did, for you. To keep you safe. Everything--from letting you go at the prom, to tonight at the ball--it's all been for you. As much as I tried to tell myself it was for the Saxons, it wasn't true. As much as I said I was going to Istanbul just for Fitz, it wasn't true. Every second I wasn't with you, I was thinking about you. Worrying about you. It wasn't for them. It was all for you. — Maggie Hall

The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element. — Joseph Devlin

So, in the morning light, where they flapped in the drying wind, the bear and the star defied the Saxons. — Bernard Cornwell

We have a lot of black Anglo-Saxons. Their skin is black, but their brain is white. When I get real mad at them, I call them 'graham crackers.' — Paul Mooney

The Anglo-Saxons had a great word for the right word, the word that you need right now, when another one simply would not do. That word is wordriht. — Douglas Wilson

While the Roman Empire was overrun by waves not only of Ostrogoths, Vizigoths and even Goths, but also of Vandals (who destroyed works of art) and Huns (who destroyed everything and everybody, including Goths, Ostrogoths, Vizigoths and even Vandals), Britain was attacked by waves of Picts (and, of course, Scots) who had recently learnt how to climb the wall, and of Angles, Saxons and Jutes who, landing at Thanet, soon overran the country with fire (and, of course, the sword). — W.C. Sellar

You Anglo-Saxons have largely broken away from such dependence on family. Each generation feels perfectly free to act alone and you are not afraid. — Helen Simonson

Chen pointed to the cub. "There's your brute." Then he pointed to the pups. "And there's your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they've retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It's not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples. — Jiang Rong