Teaser Tuesday (8 February)

Teaser Tuesday once again...

                Submit! 

               After more than five decades of unrelenting mental strife, T'Prynn's answer remained unchanged.

               Never. 

ST Vanguard: Harbinger, David Mack

The ancient Greek philosophers, as ever, had their own vies about the nature of living things and, as in most of their well-meaning pronouncements, they were utterly but engagingly wrong. The self-styled god Empedocles, for instance, shortly before he unwisely chose to demonstrate his own divinity by hurling himself into the crater of Mount Etna, had supposed that animals are built from a universal kit of parts which, conjoined in various combinations, gave elephant, gnat, horned toad, and man. 

p. 6, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science

"That's how you do it!" he shouted at the archers, 'you rip their bellies open, shove blades in their eyes, slice their throats, cut off their bollocks, drive swords up their arses, tear out their gullets, gouge their livers, skewer their kidneys, I don't care how you do it, so long as you kill them! Isn't that right, Father Christopher?"
"Our Lord and Saviour could not have expressed the sentiment more eloquently, Sir John."

p. 106, Agincourt. Bernard Cornwell.

This is funnier in context, wherein a warlord berates and cajoles a group of new men being trained to fight under his command; ever tirade is followed by a bland  affirmation from the warlord's chaplain. I don't know if Cornwell meant to make Sir John Cornwaille sympathetic or not, but his blustering dialogue was great fun to read aloud throughout the book.