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1 " Yet, although many priests were extremely poor, the Church as an institution was not only very rich but also powerful. It paid no taxes, voluntarily contributing instead a grant to the state every five years, and, as the amount of this grant was decided in the quinquennial Church Assemblies, the clergy were able to exercise a considerable influence over the policies of the Government. "
― Christopher Hibbert , The Days of the French Revolution
2 " Francesco de Pazzi thereupon stabbed him with such frenzy, plunging the blade time and again into the unresisting body, that he even drove the point of the dagger through his own tigh. Giuliano fell to his knees while two assailants continued to rain savage blows upon him, slashing and stabbing until the corpse was rent by nineteen wounds.The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall "
― Christopher Hibbert
3 " I f you sound your trumpets, we will ring our bells. "
― Christopher Hibbert , The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall
4 " I do not deny my past. I have been a great wanderer from what is right, but at least I know it and hope that the knowledge has not come too late. "
― Christopher Hibbert , The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519
5 " When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, though, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. The various taxes and duties levied in France – the gabelle, the traites, the aides as well as the capitation and the vingtièmes–were all, as he discovered, subject to variations, exemptions, inequalities in distribution and abuses in collection that made the evils of the system one of the principal causes of social unrest. Yet the increasing expenses of government and public works and the costs of the country’s wars – in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about 2,000 million livres–rendered the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy. "
6 " alacrity. "
― Christopher Hibbert , Life in Victorian England
