Mark Borsi

“The two dictators toured the city’s historic sites, including a several-hour visit to the Uffizi and a walk across Vasari’s secret corridor above the Ponte Vecchio. While Mussollini was bored stiff by the sightseeing (“It would take a week to get through all this art,” he muttered under his breath), Hitler was absorbed by masterpieces like Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo.19 The”
― Joseph Luzzi, Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

“common misconceptions Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646). The ordinary people, he complained, are unable to filter their senses through reason, so that for example they consider the Earth to be far bigger than the sun: Hopelessly continuing in mistakes, they live and die in their absurdities; passing their days in perverted apprehensions, and conceptions of the World, derogatory unto God, and the wisdom of the Creation. Again, being so illiterate in the point of intellect, and their sense so incorrected, they are farther indisposed ever to attain unto truth.”
― Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything

“Dudley and Stephens’s main holding, about the need to defend individual rights in the face of utilitarian calculations, is an important moral and legal touchstone. Dictators have, throughout history, sought to justify atrocities through hedonic calculus. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin insisted that their concentration camps, planned starvations, and other forms of mass murder were a step on the way toward building a better world. There will always be tyrants who argue that the dead bodies piling up will promote the greatest good for the greatest number. Dudley and Stephens represents a firm rebuke”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“The analogy was still used in the eighteenth century. In a discussion of curiosity in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume wrote that ‘there cannot be two passions more nearly resembling each other, than those of hunting and philosophy, whatever disproportion may at first sight appear betwixt them’. Both, he said, require attention and dexterity if they are to overcome the inherent difficulties and uncertainties. And he perceptively notes that for these pursuits to excite feelings of passion and satisfaction they must have apparent utility, even if it is only a convenient fiction. The rich man does not need personally to go hunting for his evening meal, yet he finds pleasure in shooting partridges and pheasants that he will not feel by bagging crows and magpies.”
― Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything