Middle ages Quote by David Kahn

“The only writer of the Middle Ages to describe cryptography instead of just using it was Roger Bacon, the English monk of startlingly modern…

— David Kahn

“Much of the history of cryptology of this time is a patchwork, a crazy quilt of unrelated items, sprouting, flourishing, withering. Only toward the…

— David Kahn

“The Arabic knowledge of cryptography was fully set forth in the section on cryptology in the Subh al-a ‘sha, an enormous, 14-volume encyclopedia”

— David Kahn

“But of any science of cryptanalysis, there was nothing. Only cryptography existed. And therefore cryptology, which involves both cryptography and cryptanalysis, had not yet…

— David Kahn

“Cryptology was born among the Arabs. They were the first to discover and write down the methods of cryptanalysis. The people that exploded out…

— David Kahn

“From the early days of its existence, cryptology had served to obscure critical portions of writings dealing with the potent subject of magic—divinations, spells,…

— David Kahn

“cryptology is black magic in itself springs ultimately from a superficial resemblance between cryptology and divination. Extracting an intelligible message from ciphertext seemed to…

— David Kahn

“This kind of work, particularly in the early stages of a difficult cryptanalysis, is perhaps the most excruciating, exasperating, agonizing mental process known to…

— David Kahn

The alchemists spent years in their laboratories, observing the fire that purified the metals. They spent so much time close to the fire that…

— Paulo Coelho

“European scholars had translated into Latin two important Arabic manuscripts, written by the ninth-century Persian mathematician Abū ‘Abdallāh Muammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (ca. 780–ca.…

— Keith J. Devlin

“All this stained cryptology so deeply with the dark hues of esoterism that some of them still persist, noticeably coloring the public image of…

— David Kahn

“from Wilhelm Reich , the esoteric teachings of Secret Orders and Tantric practices. We believed that this "mixture" of ancient and modern wisdom would…

— Christopher Hyatt