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Thanks for posting. Very interesting. He makes many insightful observations, and then sometimes he follows up with something that seems contradictory or unrelated. Is he checking to see if we're paying attention?

For example he cites Pope Urban II's successful exhortation to 12th century knights to start the Crusades as an example of clerical power, when in the paragraph directly above he said that when warriors didn't have a war they created artificial "wars" –tournaments. It seems to me that the knights were probably happy to find a real war to occupy them.

I really don't get this:
"In medical terms, Freud is now considered a quack. But his notion of sex as an energy like the steam in a boiler, which must be released in an orderly fashion or the boiler will blow up, remains with us, too. At this very moment, as we gather here in the Warner Theatre, you can be sure that there are literally millions of loin spasms and hip-joint convulsions that are taking place at this very instant throughout the world that would not be occurring were it not for the power of the words of Sigmund Freud."

Is he saying that millions of people are engaging in sex only because Freud encouraged them to rather than explode with the pent up desire? You know, I bet that's not the first thing on their minds. But what a way with words!