August 11, 2004

Quotes for Reflection

By Paul

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

-Orson Welles (cited in Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits, by John Barrow, p.31)


It is probably no coincidence that the hotbed of medieval Europe’s inchoate capitalism was Italy, with its Mediterranean exposure to Islamic culture.

-Robert Wright, Non Zero, p.158

Posted at August 11, 2004 01:45 PM

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