Nations are not ruined by one act of violence, but gradually and in an almost imperceptible manner by the depreciation of their circulating currency, through its excessive quantity.
Interpretation
Nations decline gradually due to economic instability rather than through single acts of aggression.
Copernicus implies that the downfall of nations is often subtle and insidious, primarily driven by the devaluation of currency caused by overproduction. This highlights the fragility of economic systems and the importance of maintaining a stable currency to ensure the health and longevity of a nation.
In practice
In a speech about economic policy, one might say, 'As Copernicus noted, nations are not destroyed overnight but through gradual economic decline.'
So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.
So if the worth of the arts were measured by the matter with which they deal, this art-which some call astronomy, others astrology, and many of the ancients the consummation of mathematics-would be by far the most outstanding. This art which is as it were the head of all the liberal arts and the one most worthy of a free man leans upon nearly all the other branches of mathe matics. Arithmetic, geometry, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and whatever others, all offer themselves in its service.
Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heavens as its center, would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves.
The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects, most deserving to be known.
The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.
So, influenced by these advisors and this hope, I have at length allowed my friends to publish the work, as they had long besought me to do.
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.
You cannot make a cheap palace.
To drop into being means to recognize your interconnectedness with all life, and with being itself. Your very nature is being part of larger and larger spheres of wholeness.
I am a socialist; of course I am a socialist. To hold a vision that society can be fundamentally different, to believe that all people can be equal - that is not a new idea.
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