“The medieval statuary, still clinging to cathedrals in protected locations, is strangely exhilarating. This is not just because it is older, although the patina helps. It is because the “uplift” rises above the squalid.”
-David Warren
"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love - they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." ~ Lime, as portrayed by Orson Wells in The Third Man