Quotes from Giorgio De Santillana

The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

Part of the trouble is modern. Since the rescuing of the texts by the great philologists of the Nineteenth Century, one school after another has tried to inject its preconceptions into their meaning, according to the way in which they read the history of philosophical ideas. Part is ancient. And it begins very early. Plato, Aristotle, Eudemus, Theophrastus, Proclus, Simplicius are clearly at odds about what Parmenides may really have meant.

So we are led back to the neutral ground on which Parmenides had placed himself, a ground where reason and truth about nature were one and the same.

The Pythagoreans had no sex prejudice, contrary to later times, but Parmenides goes much further than they did, further than ever Mr. Robert Graves would dare. His matriarchal absolutism is revealed not only in his Daemon Lady but in all her attendants and epicleses,...

I have always understood that there is a kind of philosophical language which is only accessible to special philosophers

Metaphysics, whatever it may be, seems still to lead men astray much more than any physics.

Real problems follow upon each other in a way which makes sense to the intellectual imagination.

the line of mathematical imagination and that of philological critique seem to have faced each other in mutual incomprehension through the centuries

It is surely good method to posit our ignorance of a dazzling, familiar and yet ununderstood word, by treating it formally as an unknown term, and trying to define it by context

causes which are indistinguishable intrinsically, when considered by themselves, cannot produce distinguishable effects.

Non-being is "not to be spoken of," for it is, in the strictest sense, nowhere.

Grasp firmly with thy mind the near and the far together