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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?

— Lucio Russo The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

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More quotes by Lucio Russo

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.

The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

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.

The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

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 Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

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.

The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

About Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings.

The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lucio Russo (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.