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
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
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)
…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
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.
When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war.
nathaniel lee— Act iv., Sc. 2.
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))
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
carl jung— p 110
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
Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor.
— Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Kevin White, Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society, p.82
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)
Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of preexisting things; so that all becoming might more correctly be called becoming mixed, and all corruption, becoming separate.
Anaxagoras— quoted in Madison Smartt Bell in Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution 2005
We have exiled beauty ; the Greeks took up arms for her.
Albert Camus— "Helen's Exile" (1948)
Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the "divine madness" to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
rollo may— Ch. 4 : Creativity and the Encounter, p. 93
What is called "sponge stone" or "Pompeian pumice " appears to have been reduced by burning from another kind of stone to the condition of the kind which we see. The kind of sponge-stone taken from this region is not produced everywhere else, but only about Aetna and among the hills of Mysia which the Greeks call the "Burnt District," and in other places of the same peculiar nature. ...it seems to be certain that moisture has been extracted from the tufa and earth, by the force of fire, just as it is from limestone in kilns.
vitruvius— Chapter VI, Sec. 2-3
... all men will be grateful to you: the Hellenes (Greeks) for your kindness to them and the rest of the nations, if by your hands they are delivered from barbaric despotism and are brought under the protection of Hellas.
— Isocrates, "To Philip", 5.154, Loeb
For their part, the fifth-century Macedonian kings used their newfound wealth to pursue their twin goals of winning recognition for themselves as Greeks and Hellenizing the life of the royal court.
— Sarah B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan , Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, "Ancient Greece. A Political, Social, and Cultural History", Oxford University Press, USA, 1998, p. 376
In the genocide of various minority nationalities that followed, the Turks massacred over 350000 Greeks.
— David Levinson, Encyclopaedia of World Cultures-Ethnology, p.141
For at a congress of the Lacedaemonian allies and the other Greeks, in which Amyntas, the father of Philip, being entitled to a seat, was represented by a delegate whose vote was absolutely under his control, he joined the other Greeks in voting to help Athens to recover possession of Amphipolis. As proof of this I presented from the public records the resolution of the Greek congress and the names of those who voted.
aeschines— Aeschines, On the Embassy, 32 (Quotes)
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)
