“We can never stress enough that the Latin Alchemy of the Latin West owes nothing to the Greeks, to the Arabs it owes more or less everything. For decades we have persisted in studying fragments from the alchemists as if the contents and essence of Latin alchemy could be explained by it… It was not the Greek alchemists but the translations from original Arabic works which paved the way to Western development.”

— Julius Ruska

in Robert Halleux, ‘The Reception of Arabic Alchemy in the West', in Encyclopaedia of the History of Arabic Science, vol. 3, pp. 896-7

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Julius Ruska 1

German historian 1867–1949

Dermot Healy (1947–2014) Irish writer

Penguin Group (2013) A Conversation with Dermot Healy http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/long_time_no_see.html, Penguin US, accessed May 5, 2013

“The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass
But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint

Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

“Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199809230518.WAA19312@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

“That was the other thing that drew me to India-the language. In high school my Latin teacher taught me Greek unofficially on Monday nights. I loved Greek; I loved the idea that there was another script. And then my Latin teacher told me there was a language that was even older and more interesting than Greek: Sanskrit. So everything started coming together-the art, the literature, the language.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

On the aspect of her studying Sanskrit.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

“It is not reasonable they should be solely employed in the study of the Greek and Latin authors, and having no curiosity to become acquainted with the writers of their own nation, remain always strangers in their own country.”

Charles Rollin (1661–1741) French historian

The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, Vol. I, The Third Edition (1742), Book II, Ch. 2, Article 3: 'Of the different sorts of poems', p. 278

“Irish generosity extended not only to a variety of people but to a variety of ideas. …they brought into their libraries everything they could lay their hands on. …Not for them the scruples of Saint Jerome… they began to devour all of the old Greek and Latin pagan literature that came their way.”

Thomas Cahill book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found

“I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

U.S. Representative Claudine Schneider (RI) telling an admitted joke about Quayle
"Quayle Quotes" http://www.snopes.com/quotes/quayle.htm, Urban Legends Reference Pages
Misattributed

“Though Latin long held sway in Court and bureaucratic circles, the cultural cement of the empire’s core populations was Greek and its education was in the Greek classics and tongue. Imperial tradition, Christian Orthodoxy and Greek culture became even more the bases of Byzantium and her Hellenic community, after she had lost most of her western and Asiatic possessions in the seventh century — to Visigoths and then Arabs m Spain and North Africa, to the Lombards in much of Italy, to the Slavs in the Balkans and to Muslim armies in Egypt and the Near East. Political circumstances, and the resilience of Greek culture and Greek education, made her predominantly Greek in speech and character. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the establishment of a Latin empire under Venetian auspices, the rivalry of the Greek empires based on Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond to realize the patriotic Hellenic dream of recapturing the former capital further stimulated Greek ethnic sentiment against Latin usurpation. W1cn in the face of Turkith threats, the fifteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Michael Palaeologus, tried to place the Orthodox Church under the Papacy and hence Western protection; an inflamed Greek sentiment vigorously opposed his policy. The city’s populace in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their Hellenic sentiments fanned by monks, priests and the Orthodox party against the Latin policies of the government, actually preferred the Turkish turban to the Latin mitre and attacked the urban wealthy classes. But the Turkish conquest and the demise of Byzantium did not spell the end of the Orthodox Greek community and its ethnic sentiment. tinder its Church and Patriarch, and organized as a recognized milliet of the Ottoman empire, the Greek community flourished in exile, the upper classes of its Diaspora assuming privileged economic and bureaucratic positions in the empire. So Byzantine bureaucratic incorporation had paradoxical effects: as in Egypt, it helped to sunder the mass of the Greek community from the state and its Court and bureaucratic imperial myths and culture in favour of a more demotic Greek Orthodoxy; but, unlike Egypt, the demise of the state served to strengthen that Orthodoxy and reattach to it the old dynastic Messianic symbolism of a restored Byzantine empire in opposition to Turkish oppression.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987)

“The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilisation, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter V: "On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilised Times" (second edition, 1874) page 141 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=164&itemID=F944&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

“I am not in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin).”

Charles Clarke (1950) British Labour Party politician

Education Secretary Clarke, Letter to the Guardian, May 2003

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Julius Ruska 1

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