Claude-Louis Châtelet
As for technical applications, if Greek science did not produce many, it was not because it lacked the potential, but because Greek scholars did not want to. These people, clearly very backward compared to us, as befits men of twenty-five centuries ago, feared the effect of technical inventions that could be used by tyrants and conquerors. Thus, instead of making as many technical discoveries as possible available to the public and selling them to the highest bidder, they kept strictly secret those they happened to make for amusement; and presumably, they remained poor.
Library Zurich
But Archimedes once put his technical knowledge to use in defense of his homeland. He did it himself, without revealing any secrets to anyone. The account of the wonders he accomplished remains largely incomprehensible to us even today. He succeeded so well that the Romans entered Syracuse only at the cost of a near-treachery. Now, this science, as scientific as ours or even more so, was absolutely not materialistic. Moreover, it was not a secular pursuit. The Greeks regarded it as a religious one. The Romans killed Archimedes. Soon after, they killed Greece […] Greek science disappeared completely.
Hieronymus Bosch
On the contrary, I believe I can assert here that there is no discontinuity between the liberal era and that of tyrannies. Such a spontaneous and widespread movement did not arise ex nihilo from the times that preceded it. The very fact that they succeeded one another proves that the liberal world was the fertile ground on which the totalitarian movement developed; the 20th century is the heir of the 19th. What should have been surprising is not the inevitable conclusion, but humanity's inability to see the meaning of its present.
Totalitarian coercion developed within liberal society itself. Certainly, it did not manifest itself in principles, but rather in the techniques and myths that constitute the everyday lives of ordinary people. On the one hand, in the means: the administration, the army, the machine, the lifestyle, and the social forms they shape. On the other hand, in the anarchic reactions they provoke in a human being shaped by these forces they cannot control: a collective mentality that, like these techniques, infinitely transcends the boundaries of any one class because it is the expression of a human reaction to conditions common to almost all classes. The most directly graspable aspect of the life and spirit of modern civilization: this is the common denominator that the totalitarian "revolution" suddenly reveals.