Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one.

Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.

The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.

Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.