Athenian Quotes

#1. I sit up talking till daybreak with the young people and we have almost Athenian evenings, Athenian, I mean, only in their intellectual subtlety and refinement.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#2. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

James Madison

#3. 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.

Thucydides

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

Thucydides

#5. This police force consisted--of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service.

Friedrich Engels

#6. I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
[As quoted in Plutarch's Of Banishment]

Socrates

#7. The brainless rushing about makes us feel time starved, which, he writes "does not result in death, but rather, as ancient Athenian philosophers observed, in never beginning to live."6

Brigid Schulte

#8. It seems success takes you away from what you know, [Athenian plane passenger] said, while failure condemns you to it.

Rachel Cusk

#9. 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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#10. Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Plutarch

#11. The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.

Woodrow Wilson

#12. 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.

Caroline Alexander

#13. If what philosophers say of the kinship of God and Man be true, what remains for men to do but as Socrates did: - never, when asked one's country, to answer, "I am an Athenian or a Corinthian," but "I am a citizen of the world.

Epictetus

#14. You know well as I do that when we are talking on the human plane, questions of justice only arise when there is equal power to compel: in terms of practicality the dominant exact what they can and the weak concede what they must. (Said by Athenian envoy to the Melians)

Thucydides

#15. What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.

Moses Finley

#16. You make learning fun. Like a children's book or after school special. Tell me about your ... um, Athenian women.

Richelle Mead

#17. Besides, I know the Athenian character from experience: you like to be told pleasant news, but if things do not turn out in the way you have been led to expect, then you blame your informants afterwards. I therefore thought it safer to let you know the truth.

Thucydides

#18. I thought of Pericles' speech to the families of the Athenian war dead, in which he said, What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.

Eric Greitens

#19. The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles,

Adam Nicolson

#20. The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

H.G.Wells

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

Will Durant

#22. Athenian men, I respect and love you,
but I shall obey the god rather than you ...

Socrates

#23. Aristotle would clear up this moral confusion in an Athenian minute. Happiness, he believed, meant not only feeling good but doing good. Thus, the pedophile and the suicide bomber only thought they were happy. In fact, they were not happy at all.

Eric Weiner

#24. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices, and favoured democracy. Being thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.

Jonathan Grimwood

#25. When I did plays in high school and college, I never remember memorizing my lines, but once I had blocking, I had all my lines memorized. Once I had movement associated with words, it was fine. Before I had blocking, it was just text on a page. Once it became embodied, it was much easier.

Greta Gerwig

#26. I've taken care of it," I said My father looked at me, shocked. Then I realized "taken care of" had a very specific meaning in his line of work. "No, no, I mean he's gone.

Gordon Korman

#27. I knew instantly that I wanted that type of love in my life. To have someone I could take care of in every sense and who would trust me to do so. No matter what I asked of them.

Breanna Hayse

#28. I remember being a bathtub singer. You know, the type that sings and everybody's like, 'Shut up.'

Sean Paul

#29. Your ego is the strictest judge.
-Howard Roark in his speech at his trial.

Ayn Rand

#30. I'm glad ... that Edison didn't give up on the light bulb. That Luther refused to back down. That Michelangelo kept painting. That Lindbergh kept flying.

Charles R. Swindoll

#31. Impossible is my specialty.

Marissa Meyer

#32. The value of an item - in the mind of a consumer - is simply the difference between the anticipated price and the price on the tag.

Roy H. Williams

#33. Only idiots get bored when we've all got handheld devices containing infinite knowledge at our fingertips.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#34. True redemption is...when guilt leads to good.

Khaled Hosseini

#35. Gershwin inspired me very much. The concept of 'That Lucky Old Sun' was inspired by 'Rhapsody in Blue' - not influenced, but inspired.

Brian Wilson

#36. Traditional methods of sales prospecting are grossly inefficient.

Jill Konrath

#37. It's fantastic that 'Strictly' is beating 'The X Factor' for many reasons - but one of the main reasons is I think it's a fantastic piece of variety television. It is live, varied TV whereby we are really hanging ourselves out by the seam of our pants.

Colin Salmon