Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 338 of Chapter 6 (“The Dutch Republic”) of Johan Norberg’s marvelous 2025 book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages:

Europeans who used to think that wealth came from land and conquest and that stability came from one unifying faith noticed that the one country without land and religious oppression became the richest in the world and stayed stable when other great powers tore themselves apart in religious war. The [Dutch] republic’s openness to refugees and debate made it the epicentre of the European Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.