Quotes About Athenian

What of the Athenian last year on whose bosom a committee hung a medal to say to the world here is a champion heavyweight poet? He stood on a two-masted schooner and flung his medal far out on the sea bosom. "And why not? Has anybody ever given the ocean a medal? Who of the poets equals the music of the sea? And where is a symbol of the people unless it is the sea?

We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals—rationalism, humanism, democracy—which first took firm root in Athenian soil.

When Melos eventually had to surrender to the besieging army of Athenian and allied forces, its men were killed and its women and children sold into slavery.

I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.

members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.

Socrates was put to death because he disrupted something that, in the eyes of the Athenian establishment, was working just fine.

There is a story of a reply made by a captive taken in the island to one of the Athenian allies who had sneeringly asked 'Where were their brave men all killed?' He answered that 'The spindle' (meaning the arrow) `would be indeed a valuable weapon if it picked out the brave.' He meant to say that the destruction caused by the arrows and stones was indiscriminate.

What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.

Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians; he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.

A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.

apparently there was no reason now why a man should not do as he pleased, so long as he remained within the law. A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character

Either Plato and Xenophon are involved in a massive cover-up, or there were factors peculiar to Athenian State religion which make Socrates guilty as charged. We can only hope that the former alternative is not the case, since Plato's and Xenophon's accounts are practically our only evidence on Socrates' views.

And given that my proposal were carried into effect, the only novelty in it is that, just as the individual in acquiring the ownership of a gang of slaves finds himself at once provided with a permanent source of income, so the state, in like fashion, should possess herself of a body of public slaves, to the number, say, of three for every Athenian citizen.

The Athenian strategy moves to the top when things are going well. Spartanism grabs the throne when the world is going to hell.

We would be wise to remember that the Athenian historian Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue of his History of the Peloponnesian War characterizes hope as danger's comforter.

The Greek city-states were as keen on winning battles as the Romans were, and most had little to do with the brief Athenian democratic experiment.