Quotes from Arthur Herman

Any appeal to reason is hopeless, since "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions": and the passions are the root of the problem.

with commerce and industry had come literacy for Europe's new urban middle class.

This would be Plotinus's great message to his own age and to the future. All of us, whether we know it or not, want to be one with perfection—or as later Neoplatonists will say, to be one with God. No one wants to live in the cave. We all want to see the light; and once we discover the true trail, we can retrace the path of the spirit back to whence it came. Of course, finding the trail is the great difficulty.

The editors also realized an important secret in publishing, that information is made more memorable when it is tinged with bias. The Edinburgh Review's motto was, "The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted." The magazine became famous for its likes and dislikes, although "hatreds" might be a better word

these were quiet unassuming men and women. They went to work in their shops and counting houses, raised their children to be good Catholics, and gave generously to their local parish. If some made fortunes, they never dreamed of rising above their station or challenging existing authority. All they asked was to be left alone to pray and read their devotional tracts and follow the orthodoxies of the Church.

capitalism. Almost one hundred years before Karl Marx, Kames and the Scots had discovered the underlying cause of historical change: changes in the "means of production.

I cannot avoid believing," Luther mused, "that it was Satan himself who introduced the study of Aristotle.

The Sermon on the Mount, the third-century Christian Apologist Irenaeus told listeners, takes over where Plato's dialogues left off. Every Christian would realize the elusive goal that Plotinus was seeking in vain: the joyful reunion of the soul with God. He or she could confidently say with Paul, "O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" and hear the answer echo all the way back to Socrates's prison cell.

our passions in constructive directions.

Socrates had just smiled and shook his head. To break the law, he told Crito, even a law that he knew was unjust, would be wrong. As he told his disciples many times, "one must not do wrong even when one is wronged."3 By doing wrong, a man did injury to his soul. Doing right, by contrast, makes his soul healthy and strong. A life of virtue is a life without compromise, Socrates believed, in which the goal is perfection according to an eternal standard.

The evidence of the senses further corroborates the fact that the earth is round. How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them? In eclipses the outline is always curved; and since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth's surface, which is therefore spherical.… The text was in Arabic, but the author was a Greek.2 The man's name, Gerard noted, was Aristotle.

His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive.

The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it deserves to be destroyed.

He is the founder of Western technology as an intellectual discipline—one might even say as a passion. He was Archimedes of Syracuse.

Italy's cities had been left largely to govern themselves since the Dark Ages.

If any single factor really doomed Aristotle as the Middle Ages had known him, and helped reformers like Martin Luther shove him to the sidelines, it was the invention of printing.

Again, our observations make it evident, not only that the earth is circular, but also that it is of no great size.

The coming of the Crusades had made them rich as well as independent

Once a free people have reached this point, Machiavelli concluded, there is no hope left. Their empire may expand, as Rome's did under the emperors. The wealth can continue to pour in. The arts may flourish; the political factionalism makes for dramatic entertainment, while people ignore the underlying rot. But such a society is doomed, unless a major crisis forces a change in its thinking.

to be known as "an Edinburgh Reviewer" made people stop and stare at dinner parties or literary gatherings—although sometimes it made other people stand up and walk out.

All around him were stacks of books in Arabic on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, physics, and philosophy by various Greek and Arabic authorities. They included many works by Aristotle that no one in western Europe had opened in six hundred years.

Leonardo da Vinci. His voluminous notebooks reveal his peculiar fascination with observation and invention. This is his Aristotelian side. But his famous etching of Vitruvian Man reveals his more mystical, Platonic side.

Plato was crucial. His works provided a framework for making Christianity intellectually respectable, while Christianity in turn gave Plato's philosophy a shining new relevance. The supreme light of truth that had hovered outside Plato's shadowy cave was now revealed to be the light of Christ.8

The problem with modern society, Sartre warned, was that it wants everyone to be the same, that is, to be bourgeois. "In fact," Sartre concluded, "one becomes bourgeois by choosing, once and for all, the analytical vision of the world, which tries to impose itself upon every man," capitalist or Communist, eastern or western, black or white.34 Instead, man in the postmodern age must look for a true individualism, the product of what Sartre calls his total situation