Quotes from Diane Moczar

Catholics have always held that the soul is immeasurably more important than the body. Therefore, one who destroys the faith and grace that are the life of the soul is more guilty than one who merely kills the body. For this reasonable attitude there is surely no reason to apologize.

Individual natural human rights are considered one of the great contributions of the glorious Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, so the professor thought he was on safe ground in asking such a thing of the miserable Middle Ages. Well, what do you know; a few years later, medievalist Brian Tierney's The Idea of Natural Rights traced this concept back to medieval philosophers, including St. Thomas Aquinas.

Finally, Galileo did not say "And yet it does move" as he left the courtroom. There is no contemporary record of his saying this; the claim first appears in a book about Galileo written over a century later.1

During the investigation, Galileo lived in a Vatican palace with a servant, his food and wine provided by the Tuscan ambassador. He was never in prison and was neither tortured nor in fear of torture. The tribunal of cardinals read and voted on the report of the two officials who dealt with the accused; three refused to vote, and the pope never confirmed the verdict. As Descartes remarked, the action taken against Galileo was merely the disciplinary action of a committee.

The emphasis on final causality, the answer to the ultimate Why, was abandoned in favor of the descriptive how — how it operates, not why it is there in the first place.

As Auguste Comte observed, "All revolutionary ideas are only social applications of the principle of private interpretation.

the bizarre reign of Oliver Cromwell, far more of a tyrant than King Charles ever was. The few non-Puritan members of Parliament were evicted, and the remaining few dozen supported Cromwell, who insisted that he held his "calling" from God. England was divided into military districts, and Puritan standards were enforced: Christmas was abolished, theaters closed, and other elements of English life frowned on by the "Saints" were eliminated.

Besides the three thousand dead, some fifty thousand were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Even when his rage subsided, Cromwell apparently did not repent of the atrocity; indeed, he called it "a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches." Similar scenes were repeated in other Irish cities.