Andrew Pettegree QUOTES

1 " A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

2 " The stranglehold of the departed was much resented by the new generation of aspiring authors. Which is why it is who did make the breakthrough were so admired. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

3 " It is often the parishioners, the men and women in the pews, who set the tone. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

4 " Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

5 " Print, it transpired, was not just an instrument of agitation and change: now it was equally necessary to win the peace. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

6 " Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

7 " His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

8 " In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

9 " Martin Luther was a thoroughly educated man but he wore this lightly. His sermons were littered with only examples and improving tales, drawing equally from the fables of Aesop and the follies of life he observed all around him. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

10 " In Martin Luther's life and behavior is very courteous and friendly, and there is nothing of the stern stoic or grumpy fellow about him. He can adjust to all occasions. In social gathering he is gay, witty, ever full of joy, always has a bright and happy face, no matter how seriously his adversaries threatening him. One can see that God's strength is within him. – Petrus Mosellanus "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

11 " Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

12 " The promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

13 " often finds a more interesting story behind the conventional one. Martin Luther's supposedly revolutionary resistance to indulgences took place in a German state where they were sold. Even more intriguing, they weren't sold because the ruling authorities there get a brisk business in holy relics – which Luther left alone. "

― Andrew Pettegree , Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

14 " uncomfortable truth of libraries throughout the ages: no society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations. What we will frequently see in this book is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artefacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows. The fate of many collections was to degrade in abandoned attics and ruined buildings, even if only as the prelude to renewal and rebirth in the most unexpected places. "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History

15 " same battles were repeatedly replayed, marking out the library as a political space. Should readers in the new nineteenth-century public libraries have the books that they desired, or books that would make them better, more cultured people? This raging debate was still echoing deep into the twentieth century: "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History

16 " How neglected and desolate everything looked,’ he wrote, plaintively: There was mould and rot everywhere, the debris of moths and bookworms, and a thick covering of cobwebs. The windows had not been opened for months, and not a ray of sunshine had penetrated through them to brighten the unfortunate books, which were slowly pining away: and when they were opened, what a cloud of noxious air streamed out.1 "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History

17 " University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterised the library a thing of the past. In this, libraries actually hark back to an earlier model, pioneered in the Renaissance, when libraries were often convivial social spaces, in which books jostled for attention alongside paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities. "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History

18 " Yet when the ribbon was cut and the band had played, serious questions still had to be addressed. Who was the library intended to serve? Should children be admitted? What of those who saw the library mainly as a warm place to shelter while leafing through a newspaper? The issue was complicated by the fact that neither Andrew Carnegie, whose fortune funded a swathe of civic libraries across America and the United Kingdom, nor the British Public Libraries Act made provision for the purchase of books. These decisions lay in the hands of the "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History

19 " public-spirited altruism that we should applaud – or is it a nostalgia for a world that has now disappeared and will never return? The educated and affluent part of our community takes it for granted that public funding of the arts and the facilitation of recreational reading is part of the core functions of government. But the public library – in the sense of a funded collection available free to anyone who wants to use it – has only existed since the mid nineteenth century, a mere fraction of the history of the library as a whole. If there is one lesson from the centuries-long story of the library, it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful. "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Library: A Fragile History

20 " There has been more error propagated from the press in the last ten years than in a hundred years before,’ was the jaundiced judgement of John Adams, second president of the United States, and a frequent victim of press vituperation and ridicule.9 "

― Andrew Pettegree , The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself