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1 " None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits. "
― Edmund Crispin
2 " If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos… "
― Alexander the Great
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. "
― Russell Shorto , Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason
