7 Quotes by Edward Dolnick

They believed in angles and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws.

The question was not whether the world would end but how soon the end would come.

...religion focused far more on damnation than on consolation.

The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as "stone dolls." He waved poetry aside as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." He rejected opera after a single encounter. "The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.

In the century of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton,” one historian wrote, “the most versatile genius of all was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Especially riches pulled from the ground. Two-thirds of all American workers labored on farms, with sweat and muscle the only fuels. “There was no quittin’ time and no startin’ time,” a folk proverb declared. “It was all the time.

It’s always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we’ve lost more than the losing side’s version of history. We’ve lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.