Quotes About Athens

An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

There's not a whole lot to do in Athens. When I was 13, I just started entertaining myself by writing songs. I'd sit in my room for 10 hours playing the same song, stacking vocals, trying out different drum beats, realizing no one would ever hear this but having so much fun. I guess I got my voice from just doing that so often.

O bright and violet-crowned and famed in song, bulwark of Greece, famous Athens, divine city!

We who of old left the booming surge of the Aegean lie here in the mid-plain of Ecbatana: farewell, renowned Eretria once our country; farewell, Athens nigh to Euboea; farewell, dear sea.

He made the city [Athens], great as it was when he took it, the greatest and richest of all cities, and grew to be superior in power to kings and tyrants. Some of these actually appointed him guardian of their sons, but he did not make his estate a single drachma greater than it was when his father left it to him.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

I have a very clear memory of my first encounter with myth, sitting in a mobile library and travelling, at the same time, with Theseus on the road to Athens. By the time we'd met, and disposed of, the pine-bending giant Sinis, I'd become completely entranced. Within a few months I'd read every book on myths, legends and folklore in our two nearest libraries.

My parents are from the South - they were both born in Birmingham - so my dad saw R.E.M. really early on when they were playing college stuff in Athens. He had a bunch of their cassettes from the '80s, and when I was 8, 9, or 10, those were the sort of things that were around the cassette player in the living room.

What is the most important moment in my career? The Champions League final played in Athens in 2007 when I netted a double.

I will say that anyone who supports Scottish independence should go to Athens. Because nothing works. It is a disaster. It is a ruined, dirty place where people do not have money or future prospects. The day one after independence, Scotland would be worse.

I have a small studio set up in my house in Athens. I'll wake up, have a nice breakfast, and I won't surface until dinnertime. I'm very domesticated in that way.

My worst holiday was in Athens when I was a young drama student at Rada in 1965. I ran out of money. I had my things stolen and I wasn't able to speak a word of the language.

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

If I had engaged in politics, O men of Athens, I should have perished long ago, and done no good either to you or to myself.

Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.

As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of "Western" freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.64

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It's never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

How great are the dangers I face to win a good name in Athens.

I hope it really comes off. It would make my dad really proud." (about the song for the coming 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece)

But in Athens, in Platonic Athens, at least, the idea that each man must himself be a research worker in the truth if he were ever to attain to any share in it, seemed rather to attract than to repel.

The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin, of Athens and Sparta. The aspiring genius of Rome sacrificed vanity to ambition, and deemed it more prudent, as well as honorable, to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or barbarians.

I watched my idol and fellow Dutchman Tiesto. He was the first DJ to play live on stage at an Olympic event - the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. At eight years old, all I can remember thinking was, 'I want to be a DJ.'

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

In Athens I was 17 and I didn't have any expectations. I was just swimming fast and racing everybody. I didn't have the joy after my races in 2007. I didn't want to go to Beijing. I had to for sponsors.