“It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.”

So that such ideas are opposed both to physical principles and to the authority of the Holy Writ which many time: confirms the stability of the Earth (as we shall discuss more fully elsewhere).

When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.

From his observations, he concluded that it [Tycho’s supernova] was not some kind of comet or a fiery meteor, whether these be generated beneath the Moon or above the Moon, but that it is a star shining in the firmament itself.

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.

That the machine of Heaven is not a hard and impervious body full of various real spheres, as up to now has been believed by most people.

Those who study the stars have God for a teacher.

An astronomer must be cosmopolitan, because ignorant statesmen cannot be expected to value their services

One that has never previously been seen before our time, in any age since the beginning of the world.

The star [Tycho’s supernova] was at first like Venus and Jupiter, giving pleasing effects; but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a period of wars, seditions, captivity and death of princes, and destruction of cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air, pestilence, and venomous snakes.

May I not seem to have lived in vain.

And when statesman or others worry [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions.

It will be proved that it extends everywhere, most fluid and simple, and nowhere presents obstacles as was formerly held, the circuits of the Planets being wholly free and without the labour and whirling round of any real spheres at all, being divinely governed under a given law.

The body of the Earth, large, sluggish and inapt for motion, is not to be disturbed by movement (especially three movements), any more than the Aetherial Lights [stars] are to be shifted.

There is something eccentric in the orbit of Mars.

For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable.

Behold, directly overhead, a certain strange star was suddenly seen . . . Amazed, and as if astonished and stupified, I stood still

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Not Churchill. Sixty-five, old for a Churchill.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.