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1 " We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death. "
― Russell Shorto , Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason
2 " They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod. "
3 " In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense. "
4 " Opinions differ on the question of whether a golden age is something you can experience while it's happening or whether it only comes into focus on reflection...no matter how grand and prosperous and momentous the time in which you are living may be, its grandeur is inevitably stained by the incessant drabness of the present. "
― Russell Shorto , Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City
5 " For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out. "
6 " ...the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means 'technically illegal but officially tolerated. "
7 " So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values? "
8 " There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might “go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation”). "
9 " Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it. "
10 " For individual freedom can come about only, can be conceived only, if there is some sense of security to life. "
11 " You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It’s a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun. "
12 " a basic component of individual rights is the right to own property. "
13 " Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools. "
14 " The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology—the printed book—and "
15 " There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country’s first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device. "
16 " It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years’ time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs. "
― Russell Shorto , The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
17 " Manhattan is where America began. "
18 " the colony, enough time to impress the settlers with his abilities, and then returned to Europe; now he was coming back. Not long after his ship, the Sea-Mew, passed through the narrows between Staten Eylandt "
19 " He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it. "
20 " Relying on physical remedies alone was often seen as downright ungodly: in England, Puritan minister John Sym advised “caution” that people “dote not upon, nor trust, or ascribe too much to physical means; but that we carefully look and pray to God for a blessing by the warrantable use of them.” To do otherwise—to rely on a physic or powder alone—would be to put the material above the spiritual. That was why a strictly mechanical approach to medicine was considered dangerously atheistic. "
