Verses are hardly fashionable any longer – everybody has begun to play at being the geometer and the physicist… sentiment, imagination, and the graces have been banished. Someone who had lived under Louis XIV and returned to the world would no longer recognize the French; he’d think that the Germans had conquered this country. (Voltaire to Cideville, 16 April 1735)

When the arts and sciences come to perfection in any state, from that moment they naturally, or rather necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive in that nation, where they formerly flourished. (Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,’ 1742)

The arts and sciences, in general, during the three or four last centuries, have had a regular course of progressive improvement. The inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation, and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity, have occasioned changes in the condition of the world and the human character which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity. A continuation of similar exertions is every day rendering Europe more and more like one community, or single family. (John Adams, Preface to ‘A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the USA,’ 1787)

Great men I call those who have excelled in the useful or the agreeable. Those who sack provinces are only heroes. (Voltaire to Thieriot, 15 July 1735)