Quotes from Arthur Herman

This time it was the Turks who were coming, fierce warriors from the steppes of Asia and followers of the religion of Muhammad. This time there were not enough soldiers, not enough cannons and ships, and nowhere to run. Nothing could save the Roman Empire's last capital.

liberty. "All politeness is owing to Liberty," he wrote. "We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men's Understanding. 'Tis a destroying of Civility, Good Breeding, and even Charity itself. . . ." Shaftesbury

In the absence of any force to maintain law and order, power belonged to whoever was strong enough to seize it.

Ficino offered the age a new intellectual master. "Aristotle's genius is purely human," he wrote, while "Plato's is both human and divine.

As nature has implanted in every man a desire of his own happiness, and many tender affections towards others . . . and granted to each one some understanding and active powers, with a natural impulse to exercise them for the purposes of these affections; 'tis plain each one has a natural right to exert his power, according to his own judgement and inclination, for these purposes, in all such industry, labor, or amusements, as are not hurtful to others in their persons or goods. . .

Constantinople, the largest city in the world and capital of the Byzantine Roman Empire (Rum to Arabs and Turks), had fallen. Europe's last surviving link to the age of the Caesars would be remade as a Muslim city and renamed Istanbul. It would remain the headquarters of the sultan's descendants for the next 460 years.

For Sale, Europeans are nature-haters; they are cut off from life.

If business profits rose during the war, labor's wages rose much more—an average of 70 percent.

action is best, which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number

Man has freedom to do all he wills," Spencer wrote, "provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man.

To Clement and his generation, Christianity was not the enemy of philosophy, but its finest and last expression.

The Florentines of the generation of 1402, men like Bruni and Alberti, had wanted to use the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks and Romans to change the world. Marsilio Ficino wanted to use it to change the self.

ornery enough that they will not stay where the rule was laid down. In that I believe you will find the greatest hope for America's future. —William S. Knudsen

The fact that the study of nature proved beyond refutation the existence of a perfect and benevolent Creator was for Newton both exhilarating and liberating.

If freedom in terms of political liberty was proving to be a dead end in Italy and elsewhere, Plato offered a different path to freedom: freedom through the creative spirit.

The wisdom Socrates had brought to the Greeks, Clement asserted, Jesus had brought to the Jews and other barbarians. In fact, Socrates and Jesus were spiritual brothers. Just as Plato and Aristotle founded schools to teach disciples, so now Christ was the new "schoolmaster" of the human race.

With Saint Augustine, we come to the end of the road as far as the Greco-Roman world is concerned.

Ever since the emperor Constantine had invested dominion over the Church in the bishop of Rome,‡ successive popes had borrowed his Neoplatonist vocabulary of imperial authority to describe their own. The Catholic Church saw itself as a Platonic copy of the true Universal Church, the Body of Christ. And just as the Body of Christ has only one head, went the argument, so also must Christian society. God

the commercial stage represents the greatest change from the past.

Not everyone, however, bought the formula. Traditional Platonists found themselves like MIT graduates being confronted by people who claim to have learned plasma physics taking an Internet class over the summer. They were furious about what was happening and fought back hard.

Like Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, Wells foresees a future divided between a permanent underclass and a "cognitive elite.

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" One of Augustine's fellow Christian Africans, Tertullian, had posed that question in the third century. His meaning was all too clear. What do Plato, Aristotle, and the rest really tell us about wisdom and salvation, compared with the Bible and Christianity? More than a century later, Augustine bleakly answered: Not much.

Therefore there is one body and one head of this one and only church, namely Christ and Christ's vicar, Peter and Peter's successor." Pope Boniface VIII had written this three years earlier in 1302, and it was that claim of papal sovereignty over Christendom that was the source of all the trouble.

Knox and Buchanan believed that political power was ordained by God, but that that power was vested not in kings or in nobles or even in the clergy, but in the people.