University of Buckingham Press

radical libertarian answer is that the state provides nothing useful that liberty cannot provide better—by free choices, free markets and charity. People are the best judges of how to lead their own lives.

What I am driving at here was nicely expressed by Newton, who described himself and his fellow scientists from the seventeenth century as dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. Even in saying this, the author of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (written in ancient Latin, of course) was echoing the 12th century Bishop of Chartres, John of Salisbury, who said the same thing.

To echo T.S. Eliot, we know more than our forebears, and part of what we know is them.