Famous Archimedes Quotes

Perhaps the most famous of these is the Archimedes Palimpsest, first written in Constantinople in the tenth century and then cleaned and overwritten three centuries later by a monk making a prayer book. In 1906, a Danish classicist identified the original text as the work of Archimedes. Since

Two thousand years ago Archimedes famously said, “Give me a large enough lever and a place to stand and I will move the world!” Well, nobody ever gave him that lever, and that’s why the world is still in pretty much the same place now as it was then: between Venus and Mars, orbiting the sun, and crawling with idiots.

He experimented with pulleys, by which he demonstrated his famous leverage principle, “that with any given force it was possible to lift any given weight.” This enabled him to stage one of his most famous coups de théâtre in front of King Hiero and the entire city of Syracuse. Archimedes tied a series of pulleys to a dry-docked three-masted ship loaded with cargo and passengers, and then, to the crowd’s stunned amazement, he lifted it into the harbor by himself. This led Hiero to declare, “From this day forward, Archimedes is believed no matter what he says,” which led Archimedes to reply in the full flush of triumph, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the earth.

Was it not in prayer that St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, St. Dominic, and so many other famous [20]Friends of God have drawn out this divine science which delights the greatest geniuses? A scholar has said: “Give me a lever and a fulcrum and I will lift the world.” What Archimedes was not able to obtain, for his request was not directed by God and was only made from a material viewpoint, the saints have obtained [36v°] in all its fullness.

The Alexandria universities were also the home to many famous mathematicians such as Apollonios, Euclid, and Archimedes. Famous inventors also underwent their studies there, such as Ktesibios (who created the water clock) and Heron (who designed the model steam engine).