‘A small change in a system to meet a parochial purpose just happened to make the system universal as well.’
This sentence especially memorable for me because I had always wondered how intelligent the people that developed the universal ideas in the ancient times must have been and whether they expected us, people living in 2018, to continue to use those ideas. To find out that it was not in their intentions to create a system fit for everyone across all cultures and time is a little disappointing but I think that makes a lot more sense.
I also liked the examples the writer used to explain symbols, ‘sun’ and ‘tree’, because although no puns intended, I thought it was quite clever when ‘treason’ came up as the example for the limitations of symbols as I had assumed that ‘sun’ and ‘tree’ were random examples.