Quotes from Arthur Herman

The Academy's most famous dropout was raised in Macedonia, the Texas of ancient Greece.

Having seen how the democratic sausage was made, Plato was in no mood to sit at the feast.

The man who claimed to be better than anyone else had to be ready to prove it, with his words, his actions, or his fists.

The Vitruvian Man sprang from the same passion. Leonardo borrowed the Roman architect Vitruvius's belief that the parts of the human body all exist in exact proportion to one another, in order to construct a visual allegory of man's place in the cosmos.

By the time of the Great Schism, Italy had descended back into gangster politics, as in the days of Caesar and Pompey.

He liked to call people "brutes" or even "bitches" (in Scots it can apply to men as well as women).

Aristotle's overriding conviction that philosophy must necessarily be an open book, with everything as clear, organized, and straightforward as possible even for the slowest student.

Through social rules and conventions and customs, internalized by its members and made into regular habits, it turns what might be socially destructive impulses into socially useful ones.

The printed book doomed the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen. It ended his intellectual monopoly first of all because now authors appeared in print almost with the same relative ease as they appear online today. These included not only Plato but intriguing and hitherto remote figures like the poet Lucian; dramatists Terence and Sophocles; historians Plutarch and Tacitus and Josephus; and philosophers such as the Stoic Seneca and the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus.

Eugenicists generally agreed that Europe's hereditary ruling class was as much a product of genetic bankruptcy as the mentally retarded, or "mongoloid idiots"—or the Irish.

German U-boats were poised to impose a blockade of the British Isles that threatened that island nation with starvation as well as defeat.

For the fact remains that without Arab help, western Europe would never have recovered its knowledge of Greek science and mathematics—still the foundations of modern science today—or understood how to interpret it.7 Arabs supplied Europe with a new scientific vocabulary, with words like algebra, zero, cipher, almanac, and alchemy; and a new system of recording numbers that we still call Arabic numerals.

For medieval thinkers, this was an eye-opening revelation. Side by side with divine truth, Averroës was saying, lay another truth, that of the natural world. This insight earned Averroës an admiration equaled by no other living non-Christian. It is why Dante praises him in his Divine Comedy and why Raphael gives him a prominent place in his School of Athens.

In the long term, the print revolution turned out to be a boon for Aristotle. His works could be studied by more readers than ever, in cleaned-up versions.

For almost a century the Christian and Islamic worldviews overlapped, especially their view of nature. The seam along that overlap was Aristotle, whom Arab scholars dubbed the Master of Those Who Know and whom Christian scholars would come to know as the Philosopher, as if there were no others of any lasting value.

But in the short term, it exposed the shortcomings of those who had relied on him as the ultimate authority on everything, especially in universities. Reformation scholars not only had more books, but had their time freed up to ponder, to cross-reference, and to set texts side by side.

privately Galileo thought the condemnation of Copernicus was wrong. "The Bible tells us how to go to Heaven," he once quipped, "not how the heavens go.

All forms of humanism, Heidegger proclaimed, lead inevitably to metaphysics, since they presuppose a human being with a fixed rational nature. Instead of freeing man, the humanist view actually reduces Being's infinite possibilities to the dim, stunted creature of the modern age.

Scotland became Europe's first modern literate society. This meant that there was an audience not only for the Bible but for other books as well.

the great, generous Russian people have been added in their naïve majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.

There is no event in Nature," Galileo wrote, "such that it will be completely understood by theorists."36 God's perfection was to be found in the numbers, not in the shapes or objects. Yet without real objects, the math can become an exercise in pure speculation or even hallucination, as Giordano Bruno's life revealed.

Golden Rule: I won't disturb your self-interest, if you don't disturb mine.

Now in the privacy of your own home, you had the text correct, complete, and whole—pure and uncorrupted, as Renaissance scholars liked to say. The era of having to rely on untrustworthy handwritten manuscripts, or some medieval glossator who spent a lifetime trying to make sense of an often muddled or even counterfeit manuscript of Aristotle, was over.

Galileo's science managed to fuse the Platonist's faith in mathematics with the Aristotelian faith in experience as the basis of discovery. All his work on mechanics, optics, and astronomy was deeply rooted in experiment and empirical research. When experience proved ambiguous or unreliable, however, Galileo realized then that mathematics must take over.