Quotes About Greeks

There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as, 'The Land Of The Burnt-Face People.'

Theatricality - that's where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn't happening to them.

We're living in extraordinary times, all the time. The issues that assail us are perennial. They haven't changed since the Greeks picked up a pen.

By the time writing was invented, the Greeks and Egyptians had already learned to extract opium from poppies to facilitate sleep.

the same disposition that impelled the Greeks and Romans to embellish their precious sarcophagi precisely as we still see them, with festivals, dancing, weddings,4 hunts, animal combat, bacchanals, thus with depictions of the most powerful press of life,i which they bring before us not only in such entertainments, but in group debauchery extending even to the point of copulation between satyrs and goats.

The Greeks, if the truth be told, were far too wise to have a consistent eschatology that presumed infallible knowledge of the afterlife. They had noted that no one ever returned from death and took the sane and sensible view that those who claimed to know what happened to a person after they died were either fools or liars.

To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. Their name for it—ponos—has the same root as the Latin poena, sorrow

Wisdom was a thing that the Greeks admired; but Christ is the true light of the world, it is through him alone that true wisdom is imparted to the mind.

A number of recent scholars have suggested that the answer lies in the abandonment of the ethics of identity altogether in favour of cosmopolitanism, a world without community.4 But no cosmopolitan society is as tolerant as it seems. In antiquity, both the Greeks and Romans attempted at one time or another to eliminate the practice of Judaism. Europe of the Enlightenment did not end anti-Semitism: it gave rise to a new and violent strain of it.

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.

There are people who have been touched by, let's call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they're no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that's a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word "barbarian" or the Daily Mail uses "Europe.

We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.

The first contribution of the ancient Greeks was the philosophy of natural law.

Very often, people will come out and say, 'Greeks aren't doing things, Greeks aren't making changes, there's no reform,' That is hogwash. We have made a huge effort. The Greek people have made a huge effort.

My father loved democracy. He loved the ancient Greeks because they invented democracy, and he shared their contempt for those who refused to participate in the political process.

The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women.

In the ancient world and, above all, among the Greeks, human nature was held in high esteem.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were comfortable with any number of deities and were quite open to allowing conquered nations to continue to worship in whatever ways they saw fit, as long as they didn't mind having an emperor who required taxes and tributes.

For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.

Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.

We have a gymnasium at our school in Frog Creek," said Jack. "We call it a gym." "People all over the world copy us Greeks," Plato said.

Sleeter Bull,* the author of the 1951 book Meat for the Table, claims the ancient Greeks had a taste for udders. Very specifically, "the udders of a sow just after she had farrowed but before she had suckled her pigs." That is either the cruelest culinary practice in history or so much Sleeter bull.

One can't even find the concept of the "immortal soul" in the Bible. It was grafted onto Christian teachings from the pagan Greeks long after the Bible was written.2

In capitalist society health is the capability to earn, among the Greeks it was the capability to enjoy, and in the Middle Ages the capability to believe.