Quotes from Arthur Herman

The other pacifists sprang forward to continue pummeling the stunned senator

The humanist education that Erasmus and his friends invented wound up creating its own schools. One of the first was St. Paul's in London, founded by John Colet.

finishing his final work on mechanics and physics, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences in 1638, four years before his death. Down to the end, Galileo protested that he was a better Aristotelian than his opponents because he believed in avoiding fallacies in reasoning, and because he believed "it is not possible that sensible experience is contrary to truth.

his real point was not that a market-based order was perfect or even perfectible. Rather, it was more beneficial, and ultimately more rational, than ones put together by politicians or rulers, who are themselves creatures of their own passions and whims.

A new concept had entered the modern consciousness. The idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people, but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before.

We establish government precisely to put a check on other people's avidity for our personal goods. Where property is, laws and government follow, not out of keen desire for them, but out of necessity.

All of Takaki's representative American figures—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Andrew Jackson, and George Custer—appear as classic degenerates, sexually twisted and driven by dark obsessions and profound psychological weaknesses.

By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato's theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy's two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato's doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.

As David Hume explained, "The mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions, proceeding from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy and melancholy disposition. In such a state of mind, where real objects of terror are wanting, the soul … finds imaginary ones, to whose power and malevolence it sets no limits.

This steadfast devotion to Latin and Greek as the basis of a liberal education instead of science or math, however, did not start as willful blindness or upper-class bias.24 It simply reflected the fact that in Erasmus's time, both languages were essential for reading the printed books of the day and for understanding Scripture as the first step toward reforming an intellectually bankrupt Church.

As for Chartres's famous flying buttresses, the first ever constructed, they were built to relieve stress on the cathedral's walls, so that windows could be available for yards and yards of glittering stained glass.

The example of Saint Socrates, as Erasmus once called him, would gently lead everyone to see that the soul's highest goal is wisdom and that the "philosophy of Christ" (philosophia Christi) is the highest form of wisdom there is.

Understanding is the reward of faith," Saint Augustine says. "I believe, in order that I may understand" will be the catchphrase of the early Middle Ages. It is the summing-up of Augustine's final authoritative fusion of Neoplatonism and Christianity.

Duels, murder, and feuding were constants in the Highlands, as was "scorning," or taking food and shelter by force from tenants of other clans when a feud was under way.

Just as a picture should provide the spectator with a new view of his world, so should a building.

What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the soul's love of beauty and perfection and its relentless aspiration for knowledge of God and therefore of ourselves.

This was perhaps the final irony. Galileo the obedient Roman Catholic became an overnight Protestant hero. He would be remembered as a champion not only of science, but of the principle of free inquiry versus papist tyranny, in Milton's words "a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscans and Dominicans licensed.

For Ficino and his followers, inside every human body is a soul struggling to get out and realize its creative powers through the pursuit of the Eternal.

Britain was "the nation of shopkeepers," a phrase that was not meant to flatter.

Greek science on Aristotle's terms, which had already fallen into decrepitude under the late Roman Empire, will take a long hiatus during the Middle Ages.

The official declaration of war came on October 19, 1739, with the ringing of bells and the Prince of Wales toasting the London populace outside the Rose Tavern near Temple Bar. "This is your war," Walpole told his rival the Duke of Newcastle, "and I wish you joy of it.

This meant various things, but two stand out. First, obviously, was that a church or a temple should look like a church or a temple, a house like a house, and not vice versa. But the Adam brothers would also assert that an architectural style must be flexible enough to compose and decorate any type of building. Therefore any building could be made to be beautiful, not only a town house or a commercial building, but even a warehouse—or a factory.

Augustine's formula, with its conscious echoes of Plato's Republic, remains the basis of the Western idea of a church to this day: Catholic or Protestant, Methodist or Mormon. This is the idea of the church as a community, whose members share the same values and beliefs and who are bound together in their dedication to love God as they love one another; and to serve His commands rather than those of some bureaucrat or politician.

Renaissance Platonism realized that it was this quest for spiritual perfection that bound together all the great religions and civilizations: Egypt, the Chaldeans and Babylonians, the Persians and Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans. All were suddenly revealed to be part of the same spiritual Big Push. All were revealed to be different aspects of the One.