[Copernicus] did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood.
What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.
Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?
The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.
It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.
There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.
History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.
Why does it [government] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
Some also deny that the earth is in the middest of the world, and some affirme that it is mouable, as also Copernicus by way of supposition, and not for that he thought so in deede: who affirmeth that the earth turneth about, and that the sunne standeth still in the midst of the heauens, by help of which false supposition he hath made truer demonstrations of the motions and reuolutions of the celestiall Spheares, than euer were made before. . . .
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)
Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man.
No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.
