Quotes About Athenians

#1. Mars, when guilty of homicide, and set free from the charge of murder by the Athenians through favour, lest he should appear to be too fierce and savage, committed adultery with Venus.

Lactantius

#2. O Athenians, what toil do I undergo to please you!

Alexander The Great

#3. Men keep their agreements when it is an advantage to both parties not to break them; and I shall so frame my laws that it will be evident to the Athenians that it will be for their interest to observe them.

Solon

#4. This was the Athenians' war against the King of Macedon, a war of words. Words are the only weapons the Athenians have left.

Livy

#5. How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was - so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth.

Plato

#6. As the Athenians to the Pnyx, the antique Romans to the Campus Martius, or our Nordic ancestors to the All-Thing, so the folk of Tilling flocked to the High Street for extempore parliament.

Tom Holt

#7. How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness!

Herodotus

#8. Bishop John Wilkins commented in 1638 on these Athenians: Those zealous idolators [counted] it a great blasphemy to make their God a stone, whereas notwithstanding they were so senseless in their adoration of idols as to make a stone their God.

Carl Sagan

#9. Correct." Kekrops sounded bitter, like he regretted his decision. "My people were the original Athenians
the gemini."
"Like your zodiac sign?" Percy asked. "I'm a Leo."
"No, stupid. "I'm a Leo. You're a Percy.

Rick Riordan

#10. We need money, for sure, Athenians, and without money nothing can be done that ought to be done.

Demosthenes

#11. Socrates defines his life's mission as awakening the Athenians to the supreme importance of attending to their souls. His timeless plea that we connect to ourselves remains the only way for any of us to truly thrive.

Arianna Huffington

#12. The Athenians are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all.

Protagoras

#13. I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy,

Aristotle.

#14. 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

#15. Demosthenes told Phocion, "The Athenians will kill you some day when they once are in a rage." "And you," said he, "if they are once in their senses.

Plutarch

#16. Eutrapelia . "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians ... lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.

Matthew Arnold

#17. Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if only indirectly and collectively, and not to have to bear its burdens.

J.M. Roberts

#18. Timon will to the woods, where he shall find
Th' unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.
The gods confound - hear me, you good gods all -
Th' Athenians both within and out that wall!
And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow
To the whole race of mankind, high and low!
Amen.

William Shakespeare

#19. Athenians are addicted to innovation. They are daring beyond their judgment they toil on with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting, they were born into the world to take no rest themselves, and to give none to others.

Thucydides

#20. Alcibiades had a very handsome dog, that cost him seven thousand drachmas; and he cut off his tail, "that," said he, "the Athenians may have this story to tell of me, and may concern themselves no further with me.

Plutarch

#21. It is not I who have lost the Athenians, but the Athenians who have lost me.

Anaxagoras

#22. The Athenians, front-fighters of the Greeks, at Marathon destroyed the power of the gold-bearing Medes.

Simonides

#23. The Athenians govern the Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you, my wife, govern me; your son governs you.

Themistocles

#24. So that we may not be like the Athenians, who never consulted except after the event done.
[Fr., Afin que ne semblons es Athenians, qui ne consultoient jamais sinon apres le cas faict.]

Francois Rabelais

#25. Civic life, though, was not optional, and Aristotle tells me the Athenians had a word for those who refused to participate in public affairs: idiotes. It is where we get our word idiot.

Eric Weiner

#26. We Athenians hold that it is not poverty that is disgraceful but the failure to struggle against it.

Pericles

#27. The Athenians had an oath for someone who was about to become a citizen. They had to swear that 'I shall leave the city not less but more beautiful than I found it.'

Richard Rogers

#28. We have the ability to be the Athens of modern times as opposed to the militaristic Sparta. I remind you that the Athenians wrote poetry. The Spartans did not.

Rita Mae Brown

#29. Ridiculous! Why don't you go into gunrunning, and sell the ancient Athenians a couple of machine guns so they can win the Peloponnesian War?

Kurt Vonnegut

#30. Their assemblies had taught the Athenians how to discuss all matters openly, with arguments for and against. This was good training in learning how to think.

E.H. Gombrich

#31. The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.

James G. Frazer

#32. The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.

Steven Pressfield

#33. With reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there were no gods at all.

Athenagoras Of Athens

#34. Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.

Plutarch

#35. I'll betide thee, say I, and may the Gods, or at least the Athenians, confound thee for a vile citizen and a vile third-rate actor! Read the evidence.

Demosthenes