Nicolaus Copernicus — "For these I care nothing, and I shall even despise their judgment as reckless."
For these I care nothing, and I shall even despise their judgment as reckless.
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More from Nicolaus Copernicus
"For the Earth, which is a planet, must therefore move in a circle around the Sun."
"In the middle of all sits the Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple, could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once?"
"Thus, the Sun, remaining in one place, illuminates all the planets equally, as if it were a candle placed in the middle of a room."
"For the motion which appears to us in the heavens is not in the heavens themselves, but in the earth."
"For it is the work of a good mathematician to compute the motions of the heavenly bodies, and to predict their positions at any given time."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The speaker declares complete indifference to critics who rush to condemn without understanding. He refuses to let uninformed, hasty judgment alter his course or diminish his confidence. Their opinions carry no weight because they haven't engaged seriously with the evidence or reasoning behind his work. Reckless judgment deserves not anxiety but contempt.
Relevance to Nicolaus Copernicus
Copernicus spent decades developing heliocentrism before publishing De Revolutionibus in 1543, the year he died. He knew clergy, philosophers, and traditionalists would attack his model as absurd or heretical. This defiance reflects his willingness to contradict 1,400 years of Ptolemaic consensus, trusting mathematics over institutional approval and protecting his life's work from intellectual cowardice.
The era
In the early 1500s, the Catholic Church and Aristotelian scholasticism dominated intellectual life. Challenging received cosmology risked accusations of heresy during the lead-up to the Counter-Reformation. Gutenberg's press spread ideas but also amplified criticism rapidly. Copernicus lived when humanist scholars were reasserting reason against authority, making his dismissal of reckless critics both personally courageous and culturally resonant.
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