Quotes from Arthur Herman

Briand realized that even now he could not dismiss France's supposed savior outright. So, instead, he elevated him into insignificance, by making Joffre a marshal of France

For example, Socrates explains that the dissolute freedom of democracies like that of Athens, "which treats all men as equals whether they are equal or not," must lead inevitably to moral corruption, civic disorder, and mob rule.

to own things is in fact to own myself. Property makes me a whole and complete human being.

Society acts as a mirror to our inner self, by reflecting back to us the reactions of others, and becomes our guide to what is good and evil in the world.

It was also Colet who suggested to Erasmus that he fuse his two interests, the Bible and ancient literature, into one. He urged him to do for ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament, what Ficino had done for Plato: use the techniques of philology to produce a clean, definitive text free from copyists' errors and scholastic muddles, a "pure Scripture" that would show people what the Bible really said, not what tradition or the allegorists said it meant.

Over time Ficino, Colet, and their colleagues raised the art of recovering a corrupt text's lost meaning to a science, which they called philology. Cleaning up and clearing up the written works of antiquity became an Italian, and Florentine, specialty, as philology uncovered new or startling meanings in even the most familiar documents

All this creative outflow—the product of a post-1402 generation of Florentines eager to celebrate their political liberty and its unleashing of human potential—we call the Renaissance. Thanks to the Florentines' reading of Aristotle, a new way of seeing the world had been born, and with it a new appreciation of civic freedom.

The lesson Scott taught the modern world was that the past does not have to die or vanish: it can live on, in a nation's memory, and help to nourish its posterity.

America, the totem of modern democratic culture, was actually "latently" fascist. The absence of a "genuine" fascist movement in America, like the absence of any "genuine" anti-Semitism, was in fact a sign of how far the corruption had spread. As Herbert Marcuse put it somewhat later, "The fact that we cannot point to an SS or SA here, simply means that they are not necessary in this country."48

Now, thanks to Erasmus's In Praise of Folly, a contempt for universities and their Aristotle-centered curriculum acquired intellectual chic.

Don't think, try. —John Hunter

Latitudinarians were "big-tent" Anglicans. The name came from the supposedly wide latitude they were willing to give to unorthodox religious opinions that a more tradition-bound Protestant might see as lax or even blasphemous. They believed Christianity should be a religion of tolerance and "reasonableness" rather than rigid dogma.

Courage in battle, loyalty, leadership through example rather than birth or status: these are the first qualities of the Viking heart, German

However, all of these "progressive" goals now require the unraveling of Western hegemony. Western civilization, once the driving force of human progress, is now treated as its greatest obstacle.

But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war, there can be no substitute for victory.

One by one, Erasmus's works poured out and were handed over to Venetian merchants, who loaded them aboard ships and pack mules to carry to every city in Europe. Aldus Manutius's Aldine Press made Erasmus the first writer to earn a living with his pen.

Susan Sontag did in 1967, that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, the emancipation of women … don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought on the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

the version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving at scientific laws by testing general hypotheses through individual experiment and trial and error.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

it was believed, liberty opens the door to a standard of excellence in both public and private affairs unknown to those living in servitude or unfree societies. In short, a republic built on Aristotle's model will allow men to achieve their highest potential not only as political animals, but as complete moral beings.

The notion that Culloden destroyed the Highland clans is a myth; the traditional ways had been dying for years. Long before, without realizing it, the chieftains and the Crown had conspired to obliterate the old system of loyalties and mutual dependence in order to consolidate their own power. The battle was the clans' last stand, just as the myth states. The glory was gone.

deflect any political challenge to established privilege and authority. The general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience" through a degraded mass culture, manipulative political elections (or "manufactured consent"), and a mind-numbing, conformist system of thought control via the mass media.4

Aquinas was no Averroist. His life's work would be an implicit repudiation of Averroës's idea that reason has a higher claim to truth than faith does.12 Instead, Thomas Aquinas's reading of Aristotle led him in a different direction. He would conclude that faith and reason are actually two sides of the same coin. His writings would try to persuade his age that men are part of both a divine and a human order, and both have valid standing in their lives.

Renaissance Florence did not forget about the importance of Christianity and sacred values. It was said that Manetti knew three works by heart: the Ethics of Aristotle, Saint Paul's letters, and Augustine's City of God.17 Still, the Florentines did insist that education needed to reflect the new secular emphasis on human freedom and the pursuit of excellence for its own sake.