The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. ... The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.

The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.

From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist ... is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. ... Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?

Since UFO stands for "unidentified flying object", the word ufology means approximately "knowledge about unknown flying objects", and is therefore a "science" whose content is void by definition. Similar considerations hold for parapsychology.

Euclid manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.

The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. ... The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.

Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal... yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently.