Ada Palmer

“When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid fire over and over...”

“In the aftermath of publishing Leviathan, there's a 40-year period where the sole goal of Western European philosophy is coming up with a good way to refute Hobbes. And in that moment, they say, okay, Hobbes is using a lot of logics about politics and about history that sound like Machiavelli.”

“He writes in the recommendation letter, 'This young man is the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas. So you should give him a job.'”

“When Pico is on trial, Lorenzo de' Medici and other powerful people really care about Pico. And they pull it out all the stops. And Lorenzo talks to his brother-in-law, who's an Orsini.”

“The reason that trial goes all the way to a capital sentence is that he doesn't have a patron... And if he had had a patron protecting him, despite how radical his stuff was, he would have been okay.”