David Wootton > Quotes

“he thought that human beings are, by and large, rather nasty. They can rarely be bothered to help one another, he noted, but are quick to seize any opportunity to do each other down.9 Moreover there was a bias in the world of which he had become acutely aware: most people were ignorant, and nothing provoked the hostility of the ignorant as much as people who knew more than they did.10 Although”
― David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies

“Quid vitae sectabor iter?”
― David Wootton, The Invention of Science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750

“The case of medicine is, at first sight, rather more intractable than that of astrology, for it is hard to disprove astrology: one would need to compare the lives of a group of people all born at the same moment.”
― David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates

“furnaces for dyers and brewers, which when known will be used without”
― David Wootton, The Invention of Science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750

“for the production of individual copies of printed books: of necessity, they are merely sophisticated estimates. The Printing Revolution was a very large-scale but at the same time very drawn-out process which neatly coincides with the Scientific Revolution (see below, p. 95). In 1500 it was only just beginning to pick up speed:”
― David Wootton, The Invention of Science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750

“The problem, it is claimed, with grand narratives is that they privilege one perspective over another; the alternative is a relativism which holds that all perspectives are equally valid.”
― David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

“The social and technological process by which we establish facts becomes invisible to us because we naturalize it. Language-dependent and institutional facts come to seem like brute facts to us: this is true for social institutions, like money, but even more so for claims about the natural world which are, in truth, theory dependent: we have naturalized the idea that the heights of mountains should be measured from sea level, an idea that would have made no sense in the Middle Ages.”
― David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution