Norfolk: Im not a scholar, as Master Cromwell never tires of pointing — Robert Bolt

"When a man takes an oath, Meg, hes holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then — he neednt hope to find himself again."

"Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law? More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that! More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake."

"More: I will not take the oath. I will not tell you why I will not. Norfolk: Then your reasons must be treasonable! More: Not "must be;" may be. Norfolk: Its a fair assumption! More: The law requires more than an assumption; the law requires a fact."

"Margaret: Havent you done as much as God can reasonably want? More: Well... finally... it isnt a matter of reason; finally its a matter of love. Alice: Youre content, then, to be shut up here with mice and rats when you might be home with us! More: Content? If theyd open a crack that wide Id be through it. Well, has Eve run out of apples? Margaret: Ive not yet told you what the house is like, without you. More: Dont, Meg. Margaret: What we do in the evenings, now that youre not there. More: Meg, have done! Margaret: We sit in the dark because weve no candles. And weve no talk because were wondering what theyre doing to you here. More: The Kings more merciful than you. He doesnt use the rack."

"Roper: This was not practical; this was moral! More: Oh, now I understand you, Will. Moralitys not practical. Moralitys a gesture. A complicated gesture learned from books."

"Cromwell: You brought yourself to where you are now. More: Yes. Still, in another sense, I was brought."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"