Quotes from Arthur Herman

He ripped aside the veil of respectability with which the ancients had clothed their traditional gods and goddesses and exposed the sordid reality underneath. What Socrates and Plato had started, the overthrow of the pagan pantheon, Origen's Christianity finished.

At Jeffrey's table, "the talk [was] always good, but never ambitious, and those listening never in disrepute.

Marx's well-worn dictum that the capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him with.

Beginning with their founder, Zeno, the Stoics taught that the key to the happy life is adhering to a strict sense of virtue and a rigid duty toward others rather than indulging in pleasure, and a renunciation of, or at least an indifference to, all worldly goods.

After much negotiation and debate, in March 1409 a general council met in Pisa to resolve the schism according to the new formula.

Aristotle may have been dull to read, but he was easy to memorize.

The philosophy of the ancients and the Stoics had reserved final wisdom for a chosen few. Christianity delivered those same truths, and the moral virtues that went with them, to the many, right down to slaves and the homeless. Plato was like a chef at a five-star restaurant, Origen said, who only knew recipes that appealed to his handful of wealthy diners. Jesus, by contrast, Origen says, "cooks for the multitudes"—and the multitudes have responded.41

As in old Edinburgh, drink opened the doors for free intellectual exchange. The

By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

a man's a man for a' that." To the Scot, appearance and outward form mean little. Instead, it is the quality of one's inner self

What was the secret of the Jews' strength and virtue? Origen offered the answer. First of all, their Scripture with its power to transform multitudes, "making the coward the hero, and the wicked good." Then there was their faith: a faith more powerful than human reason alone, because it was based on still higher wisdom, the wisdom of God.

No, Ockham concluded, there is no common nature shared by individual dogs or men that we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything that is real exists only as individuals. When I say, "All men are mortal," this is shorthand for saying, "Socrates is mortal," "Plato is mortal," and so on.

In fact, in eighteenth-century English, the language of Kames's works, property meant the same as propriety: those things that are proper to me, and to me alone. To Kames and his followers, including Hume and Adam Smith, to own things is in fact to own myself. Property makes me a whole and complete human being.

Christianity no longer just summed up ancient civilization's highest aims, as Justin and Clement had argued. It now had the power to save that civilization, Origen proclaimed, by bringing the highest moral principles down to earth right here.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

David Hume would put it even more vividly: all the other passions, including self-interest itself, have relatively minor effect on our lives, compared with the desire for property. "This avidity alone of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society .

Using his observations of the different shadows cast by sundials along the same meridian and a little number crunching, Eratosthenes made a calculation of the earth's diameter that was amazingly accurate: 7,850 miles, only about 60 off the actual mark.

The one great lesson Origen learned from his Neoplatonist teachers was that every human being was made in the image of God, in the same way Plato described all material objects as made in the image of the Forms.31 Of course, the most perfect of God's images was Jesus Christ himself, His only begotten son. However, everyone of every race, sex, age, or creed, from the lowest slave to the emperor himself, carried that same reflection of perfection.

For Hume, self-interest is all there is. The overriding guiding force in all our actions is not our reason, or our sense of obligation toward others, or any innate moral sense—all these are simply formed out of habit and experience—but the most basic human passion of all, the desire for self-gratification. It is the one thing human beings have in common. It is also the necessary starting point of any system of morality, and of any system of government

Ockham didn't use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn't true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn't mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

that famous motto that sits above Christopher Wren's tomb at Westminster Abbey... "If you seek his monument, look around you" - meaning London, 17th Century London. I think it's a motto that very much applies to the Scottish contribution to the modern World: that if you seek their monument, the Scots' monument, look around you.

Starting in the early 1300s, Europe's Low Countries—today's Belgium, Netherlands, and northern Germany—became the epicenter of a lay religious movement that eventually swept as far south as Italy. Newly enriched by the rebirth of trade and industry in their corner of Europe, every port and market town saw the same unprecedented explosion of private piety, even religious mysticism.

This posed a dilemma, which Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. "Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity," he said.

Origen's Platonized theology marks the birth of the Christian humanitarian conscience.