Quotes from Amir Alexander

Voltaire would mock the empire as "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire,

The sole purpose of terms such as spirit and immortal soul was to allow unscrupulous and corrupt clergymen to frighten men and subject them to their will.

In other words, if geometry was top-down mathematics, the method of indivisibles was bottom-up mathematics.

in a land without a sovereign, Hobbes learned, every man lives in fear and makes war upon his neighbor.

The Elements is arguably the most influential mathematical text in history.

No longer a critic, he was now a rebel,

What up to that point could have been viewed as an internal rebellion within the Church now became a schism in which two rival faiths confronted each other in open hostility.

in the absence of political order, human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Roger Bacon had complained that the calendar was "intolerable to all the wise, horrible to all astronomers, and ridiculed by all computists.

one person, of whose acts a great multitude … have made themselves every one the author" in order that peace will prevail.

is a Civill Warr with the Pen, which pulls out the sorde soon afterwards.