“Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”

Elbert Hubbard according to www.quotationspage.com [one also finds variants such as “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits” online without attribution]

“This world is very practical. You do more work, you get rewarded more; you do less work, you lose your rewards.”

Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

“My obsession with dinosaurs – glamorous, ferocious, extinct – evolved seamlessly into an obsession with ancient empires. When I read the Bible, the focus of my fascination was less the children of Israel or Jesus and his disciples than their adversaries: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Romans. In a similar manner, although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I found him infinitely less charismatic than the gods of the Greeks... As a result, by the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I was more than ready to accept his interpretation of the triumph of Christianity: that it had ushered in it an ‘age of superstition and credulity’. My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalized. The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the various crusaders, inquisitors, and black-hatted Puritans who had served as his accolades. Color and excitement had been drained from the world. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,’ wrote the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, echoing the apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. ‘The world has grown grey from thy breath.’ Instinctively, I agreed. Yet over the course of the past two decades, my perspective has changed. When I came to write my first books of history, I chose as my themes the two periods that had always most stirred and moved me as a child: the Persian invasions of Greece and the last decades of the Roman Republic. The years that I spent writing these twin studies of the classical world, living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had crossed the Rubicon, only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical enquiry, retained their glamour as apex predators. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always done: like a great white shark, like a tiger, like a tyrannosaur. Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practiced a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, where nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom, Assumptions that I had grown up with – about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold – were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilization's Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.... This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religious claims, so many of its instincts remain – for good or ill – thoroughly Christian. It is – to coin a phrase – the greatest story ever told.”

Author’s “Preface” in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [including end]

“Man Unsure If He’s Becoming More Virtuous With Age Or Just Too Tired To Sin”

Babylon Bee headline August 27, 2024

“No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature. That remark does not mean that scientists do not reject scientific theories, or that experience and experiment are not essential to the process in which they do so. But it does mean – what will ultimately be a central point – that the act of judgment that leads scientists to object a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. That decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“The German experience lies at the heart of the ‘modern experience.’ Germans often used to refer to themselves as the Herzvolk Europas, the people at the heart of Europe. Germans are also the Herzvolk of modern sense and sensibility.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“remember that neither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piecemeal or item by item. Except when all the conceptual and manipulative categories are prepared in advance – e.g., for the discovery of an additional transuranic element or for catching sight of a new house – both scientists and laymen sort out whole areas together from the flux of experience. The child who transfers the word ‘mama’ from all humans to all females to his mother is not just learning what ‘mama’ means or who his mother is. Simultaneously he is learning some of the differences between males and females as well as something about the ways in which all but one female will behave toward him. His reactions, expectations, and beliefs – indeed comma much of his perceived world – change accordingly.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude – a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know…”

G.K. Chesterton “The Strange Crime of John Boulnois” in The Wisdom of Father Brown https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/chestertongk-wisdomoffatherbrown/chestertongk-wisdomoffatherbrown-00-h.html