Magna Carta Quotes

“As we consider the charter from eight hundred years' distance, the myth and symbolism of the Magna Carta have become almost wholly divorced from its original history. That fact is in its own way as interesting as the content of the charter itself.”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

“Little at the time would have led anyone to believe that the charter agreed at Runnymede in June of 1215 was anything more tha na brave but flawed attempt to restrain an unpopular and overbearing king, which had failed in the most emphatic circumstances imaginable.”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

“For the most part, what was at issue in 1215 was a tight-knit, technical, and often quite dull shopping list of feudal demands that was mainly of interest to (and in the interests of) a tiny handful of England's richest and most powerful men. The Magna Carta's terms applied only to "free men," who were then at best 10 percent or 20 percent of England's adult population.”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

“For the most part the Magna Carta is dry, technical, difficult to decipher, and constitutionally obsolete. Those parts that are still frequently quoted—clauses about the right to justice before one's peers, the freedom from being unlawfully imprisoned, and the freedom of the Church—did not mean in 1215 what we often wish they would mean today.”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

“The sting of raising taxes to pay for expensive overseas wars is still keenly felt in twenty-first-century America—just as it was by barons in thirteenth-century England, who were so unwilling to fund John’s adventures in France.”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

“The sting of raising taxes to pay for expensive overseas wars is still keenly felt in twenty-first-century America—”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

“They attacked houses belonging to the city’s Jews, robbed the owners, and stripped stones from their buildings to improve the city’s defenses.”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty

“Several other punitive taxes were levied on England’s Jews, including a collective imposition of 66,000 marks in 1210. The law regarded the Jews as the king’s personal property—ultimately answerable to him for their lives, livelihoods, and freedom to work.”
― Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty