You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad. - Tom Stoppard

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.