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Ancient Greek Quotes

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
- David Antin

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
- John F Kennedy

You study any pretty democracy, from the ancient Greeks forward, and you'll see that the only way each system functions is with a working class of slaves. Peons to haul the garbage so the upper crust can campaign and vote.
- Chuck Palahniuk

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When they had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving them an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave.
Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy.
- Chuck Palahniuk

We will have have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones, these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.
- Gilbert K Chesterton

It was not until 1948 that Cambridge University stopped requiring a knowledge of classical (ancient) Greek as a prerequisite for admission. This requirement was based not only on the intrinsic merits of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Knowledge of Greek was a screening device to keep out the less affluent, who attended British state schools, where Greek was less likely to be taught than in private schools.
- Norman F Cantor

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.
- Angela Carter

The chiseled beauty of his features, like an ancient greek coin.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.
- Marilyn French

The ancient Greeks noticed that a man with arms and legs extended described a circle, with his navel as the center.
- Stephen Gardiner

The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don't tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.
- Colin Quinn

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
- Vladimir Lenin

The ancient Greeks have a knack of wrapping truths in myths.
- George Lloyd

What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity...
- Yukio Mishima

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
- Gilbert Murray

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. 'Nothing in excess,' professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn't I be allowed the other half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe's great beauties?
- Roman Payne

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.
- Richard Russo

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.
- Johannes Stark

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