Greeks Quotes
More Greeks Quotes
It was the Byzantine Empire, which was to realize Alexander's idea – Macedonian Panhellenism – in face of an Asia in revolt, and realize it for the Greeks.
René Grousset— The Sum of History, p. 159.
Whoever does not consider the Macedonians as Greeks must also conclude that by the 6th and 5th centuries BC the Macedonians had completely given up the original names of their nation - without any need to do so - and taken Greek names in order to demonstrate their admiration for Greek civilization. I think it not worth the trouble to demolish such a notion; for any hypothesis of historical linguists which is put forward without taking into account the actual life of a people, is condemned as it were out of its own mouth.
Otto Hoffman— Otto Hoffmann, German linguist, "Die Makedonen, Ihre Sprache und Ihr Volkstum", Göttingen, 1906
The chemist smiles at the childish efforts of alchemists but the mathematician finds the geometry of the Greeks and the arithmetic of the Hindoos as useful and admirable as any research of today.
— p. 1 (A History of Mathematics (1893))
Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you.
Alexander the Great— Alexander's letter to Persian king Darius III of Persia in response to a truce plea, as quoted in Anabasis Alexandri by Arrian; translated as Anabasis of Alexander by P. A. Brunt, for the "Loeb Edition" Book II 14, 4
The Greeks follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation.
Anaxagoras— Frag. B 17, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.
For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.
Adolf Hitler— speech before the Reichstag, 4 May 1941
Thompson and then his young men demolished a recurrent scientific myth one that had surfaced again in the 1870's: that there was nothing left to be discovered, nothing new under the sun. Part of the immutable wisdom of the day, endorsed and believed long before the greatest of scientists, Isaac Newton, was a kind of billiard ball theory of the atom, which went back to the ancient Greeks. The word itself is from the Greek atomos , meaning "inidivisible."
j. j. thomson— Richard Reeves, A Force of Nature The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (2008)
When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war.
nathaniel lee— Act iv., Sc. 2.
Certainly the Thracians and the Illyrians were non-Greek speakers, but in the northwest, the peoples of Molossis (Epirot province), Orestis and Lynkestis spoke West Greek. It is also accepted that the Macedonians spoke a dialect of Greek and although they absorbed other groups into their territory, they were essentially Greeks.
— "The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece", Penguin Publishing USA, January 1997
Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical?
— Ch. 29 (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974))
Three classes inhabited the city (Alexandria in Egypt): first the Aegyptian or native stock of people, who were quick-tempered and not inclined to civil life; and secondly the mercenary class, who were severe and numerous and intractable...; and, third, the tribe of the Alexandrians, who also were not distinctly inclined to civil life, and for the same reasons, but still they were better than those others, for even though they were a mixed people, still they were Greeks by origin and mindful of the customs common to the Greeks.
strabo— 17.1.12-13
There is no doubt that this tradition of a superimposed Greek house was widely believed by the Macedonians[...] There was a persistent, well attested tradition in antiquity that told of a group of Greeks from Argos -descendants of Temenus, kinsman of Heracles- who came to Macedonia and established their rule over the Makedones, unifying them and providing a royal house.
eugene n. borza— p. 80 (In the Shadow of Olympus: The Emergence of Macedon (1990))
The Molossians were the strongest and, decisive for Macedonia, most easterly of the three most important Epirote tribes, which, like Macedonia but unlike the Thesprotians and the Chaonians, still retained their monarchy. They were Greeks, spoke a similar dialect to that of Macedonia, suffered just as much from the depredations of the Illyrians and were in principle the natural partners of the Macedonian king who wished to tackle the Illyrian problem at its roots.
— Malcolm Errington, "A History of Macedonia", University of California Press, February 1993
Although the Macedonians, whose territory occupied the area around present-day Thessaloniki in northern Greece, considered themselves part of the Greek cultural sphere, many Greeks regarded them with contempt. In the eyes of the Greeks, the Macedonians were a mere offshoot of the original stock. They spoke a Greek dialect, to be sure, but they were led by a backward monarchy and their nobles.
— Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Dutch author, researcher and clinical professor of leadership development, "Are Leaders born or Are they made?: The case of Alexander the Great", Karnac Books (June 2004)
That the Macedonians were of Greek stock seems certain. The claim made by the Argead dynasty to be of Argive descent may be no more than a generally accepted myth, but Macedonian proper names, such as Ptolemaios or Philippos, are good Greek names, and the names of the Macedonian months, although differed from those of Athens or Sparta, were also Greek. The language spoken by the Macedonians, which Greeks of the classical period found unintelligible, appears to have been a primitive northwest Greek dialect, much influenced by the languages of the neighboring barbarians.
— J.R. Hamilton, Australian historian, "Alexander the Great", Hutchinson, London, 1973
…had been its Greek populace, the Turks massacred as many Greeks there as possible, to so1ve that ethnological problem by genocide, a term a later and more delicate…
— Clarence Pendleton Lee, Athenian Adventure: With Alarums & Excursions, p.110
It seems probable that the early Greeks were largely indebted to the Phoenicians for their knowledge of practical arithmetic or the art of calculation, and perhaps also learnt from them a few properties of numbers. It may be worthy of note that Pythagoras was a Phoenician; and according to Herodotus , but this is more doubtful, Thales was also of that race.
— W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (1905)
I have never felt any ethnic connection between the Greeks and me other than how hairy I am.
— 2004 In Scotland on Sunday,14 Mar.
But Alexander was stressing his link with Achilles... Achilles was also a stirring Greek hero, useful for a Macedonian king whose Greek ancestry did not stop Greeks from calling him a barbarian.
robin lane fox— p.60 (Alexander the Great)
And let's 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. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
robert f. kennedy— Inscribed on the Robert F. Kennedy gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
— Note: "This advice has its root in the story of the Trojan Horse, the treacherous subterfuge by which the Greeks finally overcame their trojan adversaries at the end of the Trojan War."
— Meaning: "Do not trust gifts or favors if they come from an enemy."
— Source for meaning: Martin H. Manser; David H. Pickering (2003). The Facts On File Dictionary of Classical and Biblical Allusions. Infobase Publishing. p. 46. Retrieved on 1 July 2013.
— From Virgil's Aeneid Book II, line 48: timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. Translation: I fear the Grecians even when they offer gifts.
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.
Percy Bysshe Shelley— Preface (Hellas (1821))
Such was the end of Philip (II, king of Macedonia) ...He had ruled 24 years. He is known to fame as one who with but the slenderest resources to support his claim to a throne won for himself the greatest empire among the Hellenes ( Greeks ), while the growth of his position was not due so much to his prowess in arms as to his adroitness and cordiality in diplomacy.
— Diodorus Siculus, "Histories", 16.95.1-2
But Alexander was stressing his link with Achilles... Achilles was also a stirring Greek hero, useful for a Macedonian king whose Greek ancestry did not stop Greeks from calling him a barbarian.
— Robin Lane Fox, "Alexander the Great", p.60
While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million.
— Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 285-286
However, the Treaty of Sevres was never ratified, As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to bring the treaty into force ‘resulted in the abandonment of thousands of defenceless peoples Armenians and Greeks to the fury of their persecutors, by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished.” The Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 that included a ‘Declaration of Amnesty’ for all offences committed between 1 August 1914 and 20 November 1922.
— William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, p.22
Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Persians, Chinese and Japanese could be cited as examples of ethnic continuity, since, despite massive cultural changes over the centuries, certain key identifying components name, language, customs, religious community and territorial association were broadly maintained and reproduced for millennia.
— Anthony D. Smith (1998). Nationalism and modernism: a critical survey of recent theories of nations and nationalism. New York: Routledge. pp. 191. ISBN 0-415-06341-8.
Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!
— Morris West, in The Heretic (1968).
