Quotes from Arthur Herman

For Augustine, all true community depends on God's grace. Someday, perhaps Christianity and Christendom will be the same. But not yet, he said to himself

Bildungsroman. It is a narrative of a young man steeped in Wilsonism who became intimately involved in the conference and who learned that his hero was not the man he thought he was.

Marcuse's appeal to an emergency situation bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the justifications for Hitler's emergency decrees in 1933. The resemblance is no coincidence. Like his cultural pessimist counterparts on the German revolution on the Right, Marcuse impatiently awaited the emergence of a new cultural order out of the rubble of the old liberal capitalist West.

The strain of making war would be nothing compared with the strain of making peace.

nostalgia. Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. It satisfied a deep utopian longing for the perfect society—except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection.

Pico's goal was to dissolve any difference between theology and philosophy, science and literature, art and poetry. All knowledge was One, as aspects of the One: and human beings come uniquely equipped to unravel its final secrets.

When the emperor Diocletian retired in 305, however, Constantine son of Constantius Chlorus rushed his legions down from Britain to join in the struggle for power. He also displayed a ruthless cunning in working to secure his title. He married the daughter of Diocletian's co-emperor, Maximian, then in 310 had his father-in-law arrested and strangled.

Politics in modern society, then, must involve a tension between two conflicting, but complementary principles: liberty, which preserves individuals, and authority, which preserves society.

Would Erasmus now step forward and endorse Luther as one of his own? Would he acknowledge that they were fighting on the same side and lend the tremendous weight of his reputation to the Lutheran cause?

And since all knowledge forms a whole, the corollary is never throw anything away. Every doctrine, no matter how esoteric or seemingly irrational or irrelevant, may hold yet another secret to understanding the rest.

Erasmus had no intention of becoming a martyr. In the end, he preferred to work within the boundaries of the Church, not outside them. Despite their mutual antipathy toward the Aristotle of the scholastics, Luther's opposition ran far deeper. It hinged on an issue that had separated Boethius and Saint Augustine at the onset of the Middle Ages. It had at its heart the clash between Plato and Aristotle on free will.

When the emperor Diocletian retired in 305, however, Constantine son of Constantius Chlorus rushed his legions down from Britain to join in the struggle for power. He also displayed a ruthless cunning in working to secure his title. He married the daughter of Diocletian's co-emperor, Maximian, then in 310 had his father-in-law arrested and strangled. The next year he allied himself with one rival, Licinius, in order to declare war on the other, Maximian's son, Maxientius.

Christianity also offered a hereafter, in which every soul would be judged according to its merits, just as Plato related in his Republic: except that the judges were not mythic figures from a shadowy pagan underworld, but the awesome team of Father and Son and Their heavenly angels.

The God that Socrates presented to his disciples stood above and beyond the familiar myths and rituals. Socrates's God shares the same transcendent immortality as the soul and lies beyond all material space and time. He dwells naturally in the same afterlife as the Forms:

The Pseudo-Dionysius begins with a seeming paradox. We see God nowhere, and yet God is everywhere. The skeptic and atheist get stuck at the first obvious truth; they fail to push on to the second. The secret is that God's presence is made visible to us not directly but symbolically, in a material world that bears the faint but still perceptible trace of a higher intelligible and spiritual realm.

Good laws will make good men, and the best laws are forged not in the heat of crisis or the give-and-take of ordinary political debate, where men's appetites take over, but through the exercise of knowledge and reason. Self-interest must learn to yield to the common interest; and men must be united if they are to be free. Taken together, that remains Plato's most important political legacy.

It was shortly after arriving in Alexandria that Strato of Lampsacus became King Ptolemy's principal adviser on all matters intellectual and scientific. Over the next several years, he would use that position to create the ancient world's most important research center, Alexandria's Mouseion, or Museum. Just as Alexandria was Aristotle's city, so its Museum would be the centrifuge for spreading Aristotle's methods and ideas across the ancient world.

if refusing to consent to a treaty that was flawed, badly conceived, and in many ways unjust was a betrayal of American boys' sacrifice on the battlefield, then why had we sent them there in the first place?

Even though the army was desperate for men, the number of blacks being drafted was kept artificially low.

Instead of stability, Heraclitus said, there is only change: ceaseless, relentless, and without end. In the desperate watercourse of existence, any notion we have of permanent or fixed values, even of our own body, is pure illusion. Instead, everywhere we look, everything we see is in constant flux and change.

the zoologist Konrad Lorenz, whose studies of animal behavior (the best known is On Aggression) stressed Haeckel's notion that animal and habitat—including man and his environment—form a single unit

It was time for Constantine to make a decisive intervention of his own. He cast aside his invincible sun god without a second thought. From this point on, he would consider himself a Christian in belief and deed. A month or two later, he issued his imperial Edict of Milan, which brought religious toleration to everyone in the empire, including Christians.

Heraclitus is supposed to have said, while his most famous sayings of all, "All things change" (Panta rhei) and "You cannot step into the same river twice," make him the father of relativism:

she refused to say where she'd gotten the gun.