Greece Quotes

200 Sourced quotes

When most objects are truly functional, this technological age, which is just beginning, will be truly civilised. When all objects in this country are truly functional, Australia will be as beautiful in its own way as classical Greece.

Archeological discoveries at sites like Ugarit prevent us from regarding Greece as the hermetically sealed Olympian miracle, or Israel as the vacuum-packed miracle from Sinai.

Cyrus H. Gordon

Only the actual conception of the divine nature changes according to the different ideas of perfection which prevail in particular ages and nations. The gods of the remoter ages of Greece and Rome, and those worshipped by our own earliest forefathers, were simply ideals of bodily strength and prowess. As the idea of sensuous beauty arose and gradually became refined, the sensuous personification of beauty was exalted to the throne of deity; and hence arose what we might call the religion of art. When men ascended from the sensuous to the purely spiritual, from the beautiful to the good and true, the sum of all moral and intellectual perfection became the object of their adoration, and religion became the province of philosophy.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth.

It doesn't take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe – and now Detroit – is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, 'Stop.' You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.

Charles Krauthammer

My desire for information was, however, too strong to be turned aside and often have I been sent away from a bookstall when the owner became offended at my standing reading, which I used to do until I was sent away... I used to borrow books from a man who kept a small shop... leaving a small sum as a deposit. At the age of twenty, Place had worked through the histories of Greece and Rome and some translated works of Greek and Roman writers.

There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

The characteristic of the English Monarchy is that it retains the feelings by which the heroic kings governed their rude age, and has added the feelings by which the constitutions of later Greece ruled in more refined ages.

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

Robert M. Pirsig

It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy... great improvement... were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.

Alexander Hamilton

The Greeks viewed the Mediterranean not as a barrier but as a network of routes connecting people who dwelt along its shores. This is familiar to any student of Greece.... the Hebrews express themselves similarly in passages like Psalm 8: 9 ("crossing the paths of the seas").

Cyrus H. Gordon

Philip II, at least from the time of his victory over Phocis, Athens, and their allies in 346, prepared to proclaim himself the champion of a United Greece against the barbarians.

With the aid of science we had built mighty civilizations thousands of years ago when most people in Europe (except in Greece and Rome) were living in forests. We had made outstanding scientific discoveries e. g. decimal system in mathematics, plastic surgery in medicine, etc. However, we subsequently took to the unscientific path of superstitions and empty rituals, which has led us to disaster. The way out of the present morass is to go back again to the path shown by our scientific ancestors, the path of Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta, Sushrut and Charak, Panini and Patanjali, Ramanujan and Raman.

Markandey Katju

The customs of both the Greeks and Hebrews in that heroic age were often alien to their respective descendants in the classical periods. We shall have to bear in mind that the gulf separating classical Israel (of the great Prophets) from classical Greece (of the scientists and philosophers) must not be read back into the heroic age when both peoples formed part of the same international complex.

Cyrus H. Gordon

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

The prevailing attitude (which is gradually losing its grip) may be described as the tacit assumption that ancient Israel and Greece are two water-tight compartments... One is said to be sacred; the other, profane; one, Semitic; the other, Indo-European. One, Asiatic and Oriental; the other, European and Occidental. But the fact is that both flourished during the same centuries, in the same East Mediterranean corner of the globe, with both ethnic groups in contact with each other from the start.

Cyrus H. Gordon

Therefore, since the others are so lacking in spirit, I think it is opportune for you to head the war against the King; and, while it is only natural for the other descendants of Heracles, and for men who are under the bonds of their polities and laws, to cleave fondly to that state in which they happen to dwell, it is your privilege, as one who has been blessed with untrammeled freedom, to consider all Hellas (Greece) your fatherland, as did the founder of your race, and to be as ready to brave perils for her sake as for the things about which you are personally most concerned.

Freedom was born in Greece because there men limited their own freedom.... The limits to action established by law were a mere nothing compared to the limits established by a man's free choice.

When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung.

William Collins

The belief in charms for protecting newborn infants is very strong in Greece.

James Theodore Bent

Prior to 1952, when M. Ventris first published his decipherment of the 'Linear B' tablets from Crete and Greece, showing that they were Greek, everyone assumed that Hebrew was recorded in writing before Greek. But now... we are reading Linear B Greek texts, written before the birth of Abraham (let alone before the date of any known Hebrew text).

Cyrus H. Gordon

V. Bérard attributed the [Greece and Israel] links mainly to the role of the Phoenicians. P. Jensen explained matters through the diffusion of the Gilgamesh Epic.... but their one-sidedness and exaggeration brought them, and indeed the problem itself, into disrepute among critical scholars. The history of the problem has been ably documented by W. Baumgartner...

Cyrus H. Gordon

This year we take our vacation somewhere else. Where is there where Americans aren't likely to be stoned by a howling mob? Spain, Greece? No, got to be out of range of the stench from the Med.
Looks like we might as well stay home.

I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt.

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence.