Word: democritus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...willing to stand or fall: "They are the truest interpretation of my philosophy. If anyone understands them, he understands me." In prose so immaculately manicured that only the polish is apparent, Santayana descends to the oblivion of limbo and seeks out his beloved, smooth-talking heroes: Socrates, Democritus, Alcibiades, Dionysius, Aristippus. The litmus with which he tests the worth of their ideas is The Stranger, a visiting earthly spirit who sounds suspiciously like a traveling Harvard professor...
...comparison with the first guess, hard, complex, dry and repellent. The first shock of the object's real nature, breaking in on our spontaneous dreams of what that object ought to be, always has these characteristics. You must not expect Shrödinger to be as plausible as Democritus; he knows too much. You must not expect St. Athanasius to be as plausible as Mr. Bernard Shaw: he also knows too much...
...urge for peace by citing a long list of immortals: Descartes ("I think, therefore I am"), Virgil (to whom the Captain erroneously ascribed Horace's phrase on war, "matribus detestata"), Thomas Jefferson ("Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"), Abraham Lincoln ("We cannot escape history"), Epicurus, Lucretius, Democritus, Kant, Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, Auguste Comte, Pierre Dubois, l'Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Poincaré, Ruy Barbosa and the Baron de Rio Branco (of Brazil), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bernard M. Baruch...