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)
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))
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
…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)
Every seat in the theater was taken when Philip appeared wearing a white cloak and by his express orders his bodyguard held away from him and followed only at a distance, since he wanted to show publicly that he was protected by the goodwill of all the Greeks, and had no need of a guard of spearmen.
diodorus siculus— Histories 16.93.1
Thou didst bring me forth for all the Greeks in common, not for thyself alone.
Euripides— Iphigenia in Aulis, 1386.
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
The Berbers belong to a powerful, formidable, and numerous people; a true people like so many others, the world has seen - like the Arabs, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans.
ibn khaldun— Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-Ibar in The Berbers, Michael Brett, Elizabeth Fentress, Blackwell Publishing, 1997 p.1
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, "Geography", 17.1.12-13
... 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
Philip first cut the ground from under it by uniting the nation in his Corinthian League[...]In this manner Philip united all Greeks (with the single exception of Sparta) into a League of states, and so for the first time in history created a Greek unified state.
— Ulrich Wilcken, "Alexander the Great"
The province of Thessalonica (Saloniki) had, together with Greece, been awarded to the warlike Marquis Boniface of Montferrat with the royal title. It comprised the greater part of ancient Macedonia and Boniface carried his victorious arms into Greece, where he everywhere divided the conquered territories among his knights; but having perished in a skirmish with the Bulgarians, in 1207, his kingdom was invaded by the Greek despot, Theodore of Epirus who was received with open arms by the Greeks, and crowned emperor at Thessalonica in 1222.
— Adolphus Louis Koeppen, Danish historian, "The World in the Middle Ages: An Historical Geography, with Accounts of the Origin", Appleton, p.409
In the genocide of various minority nationalities that followed, the Turks massacred over 350000 Greeks.
— David Levinson, Encyclopaedia of World Cultures-Ethnology, p.141
"I am among friends. And this friendship of ours [between Greeks and Serbs] has been proved in practice. And we shall do this in the future as well with words and with deeds."
— Former President of Greece Konstantinos Stephanopoulos, October 2003
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'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
