Samuel Johnson Quotes
Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution.
Johnson, Samuel. "The Rambler No. 77." The Rambler, vol. 3, J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1752, p. 143.
First Astronomy, then Geology, proved that the Creation that was described in the Bible was not literally correct. To religious fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible is the word of God or the word of those inspired by God, the only possibility of conclusion is that the science is wrong. To the extent that undermining the word of God is not acceptable to the fundamentalists, they have used every power—including the criminal law power of the state to stop the blasphemy and discredit the scientist. In 1856, there was a much larger proportion of fundamentalists in the Western World than there is today. By 2012, the vast majority of these same populations have rejected Christian Biblical Fundamentalism, and no longer attack science for its affect on religion. The minority of fundamentalists, however, are vehement in their opposition to science.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
