Soothsayer Quotes (5 quotes)
Nemo mathematicus genium indemnatus habebit.
No mathematician is esteemed a genius until condemned.
No mathematician is esteemed a genius until condemned.
— Juvenal
“Mathematician” as used here, is in the sense of astrologer, or soothsayer. In Liberii, Satura VI, 562.
A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.
In 'From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long', Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 257.
Dickens, Twain, and Jack London, each in his own way, tried to do the same thing, it seemed to me: to show that civilization is a veneer and to warn us against accepting, without question, the soothsayers of the past. Each author was saying: Don’t hide behind these façades society has erected; don’t repeat the cliches of the past and at the same time act as savagely as your predecessors did.
Recalling his high school reading of library books. In John Scopes and James Presley, Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes (1967), 20.
Hence, a devout Christian must avoid astrologers and all impious soothsayers, especially when they tell the truth, for fear of leading his soul into error by consorting with demons and entangling himself with the bonds of such association.
De Genesi ad Uteram (On The Uteral Interpretation of Genesis) [401/415], Book II, chapter 17, section 37, trans. J. H. Taylor (1982), Vol. I, 72-3.
I wonder that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
