Dutch Historian Quotes

Our thesis now is that the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in an empirical, natural, historical method.

Reijer Hooykaas

Mechanics... was an axiomatic construction; and... its problem could be solved quantitatively by algebraic methods.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis

Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.