# Quote — Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

> "But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true--that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place--that men had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since."

- Author: [Neal Stephenson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson.md)
- Book: [Quicksilver](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/quicksilver.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle#Book_One:_Quicksilver) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/quicksilver/but-they-had

## More from this book

> "My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone," Daniel finally says. "To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse. He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666—Number of the Beast and all that... When I came of age, I would be a man of the cloth, with the full university education, well versed in many dead classical languages, so that I could stand on the Cliffs of Dover and personally welcome Jesus Christ back to England in fluent Aramaic."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/quicksilver/my-father-drake.md)

> "It is a symbol of Mercury--patron of commerce--who has been worshipped in this cellar--and in this city--for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adapts itself to any container."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/quicksilver/it-is-a-symbol.md)

> "I believe that binary arithemetickal engines will be of enormous significance"

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/quicksilver/i-believe-that.md)