#greeks

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#citizen #every #free #free state #greeks

It's only very recently that women have succeeded in entering those professions which, as Muses, they typified for the Greeks. ↗

— Miriam Beard

#greeks #muses #only #professions #recently

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. ↗

— Robert Kennedy

#dedicate #gentle #greeks #let us #life

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#carried #first #french #grammar #greeks

The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character - that is the purpose of films and theatre. ↗

— Isabelle Huppert

#character #films #greeks #interest #more

And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage. ↗

— Tony Randall

#because #beethoven #crime #everybody #going

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#i #known #state #uncertainty #unknown

We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics. ↗

— Donald Kagan

#because #certain #certain things #degree #greeks

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created. ↗

— John Major

#black #created #ever #greeks #more