First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass. — Jean-Luc Godard
The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day. — David Sedaris
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism. — Georg C. Lichtenberg
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence. — John Milton
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. — Ariel Durant
Compared with the Egyptians, the Greeks are childish mathematicians. — Egyptian Proverbs
for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. — Rod Serling
Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries. — Gilbert Murray
If you deconstruct Greece, you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you reconstruct her. — Odysseas Elytis
Let us 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. — Robert Kennedy
Black men of Carthage, Ethiopia, of Timbuktu and Alexandria gave the likes of civilization to this world — Marcus Garvey
The spirit of Greece, passing through and ascending above the world, hath so animated universal nature, that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it. — Walter Savage Landor
Civilization owes to the Islamic world some of its most important tools and achievements...the Muslim genius has added much to the culture of all peoples. — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Civilization is the encouragement of differences. — Mahatma Gandhi
Greek Culture Quotes
In business you need two Jews for one Greek, two Greeks for one Syrian and two Syrians for one Armenian — Greek Proverbs
Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. — Christopher Nolan
American culture is kind of a universal culture, I guess. It's things Greeks grew up with, common references you can use. It's very interesting. — Yorgos Lanthimos
Thousands of tired, never-shaken, over civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home, that wilderness is a necessity.
Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics. — Allen W. Wood
The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Greek culture is pleasant to contemplate because of its great simplicity and naturalness, and because of the absence of gadgets, each of which is sooner or later a cause of servitude. — George Sarton
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
I had the good luck a few years ago to visit the archeological site of Zippori in Israel ... I could see here displayed the Greek culture that Jesus decisively rejected, the same Greek culture that infiltrated the Christian religion soon after his death and has dominated Christianity ever since. — Freeman Dyson
Genetically, I'm pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I'm a member of the black community. — Johnny Otis
Just as the ideal of classic Greek culture was the most perfect harmony of mind and body, so a human and a bicycle are the perfect synthesis of body and machine. — Richard Ballantine
Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. — Allan Bloom
Ancient Greece Quotes
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. — Steven Pressfield
He is the richest who is content with the least. — Socrates
The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us. — Jesse Owens
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen. — George Bernard Shaw
In many ways we are all sons and daughters of ancient Greece. — Nia Vardalos
We are living in the era of the busybody. In ancient Greece, if a person wanted guidance, it involved a long, arduous expensive journey to consult the oracle at Delphi. Today, if you want guidance, all you have to do is unplug your ears. — Margo Kaufman
Laughter ... the most civilized music in the world.
And so, inevitably, one returns to the centre of Western culture, Greece, and we have never, in any sense, lost our ties with the architectural concepts that this country's ancient civilization explored and demonstrated, nor with the political and social freedom that lay behind them. — Stephen Gardiner
Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone--glimmering through the dream of things that were; First in the race that led to glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away--Is this the whole? — Lord Byron
I judge wisely...as if nothin ever surprise me,
Loungin, between two pillars of ivory.
I'm lively, my dome piece is like buildin stones in Greece.
My poems are deep, from ancient thrones I speak. — Killah Priest
Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart? — Chet Baker
I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. — Archilochus
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.
The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Weiner for the field of control and communication theory. — Andre-Marie Ampere
Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin. — Alphonse Karr
The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise — Isadora Duncan
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world
The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life. — Leland Ryken
Prehistoric art came to move me much more than Greek art. Greek art has beautiful women and handsome men, but I don't care. — Pierre Soulages
I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living. — Raymond Chandler
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent. — John Ruskin
Greek Philosophy Quotes
Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others. — Gorgias
You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness. — Melina Mercouri
White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it. — Al Sharpton
There is no civil nor religios law, that has broken, nor can break the bond of fraternity which nature has established between men.
When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it. — Socrates
Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few. — Pythagoras
Greek philosophy departs from the assumption that we can understand the world autonomously using our rational faculties. Islam is not saying this. — Tariq Ramadan
We have created a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
The gift of truth excels all other gifts. — Buddha
...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty. — Plato
Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers. — Plato
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending. — Karl Marx
Egyptian Civilization Quotes
Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt. — Cheikh Anta Diop
Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours? — Gilbert K. Chesterton
The mystery school continued throughout the greater Egyptian civilization, which was the second age of humankind and later on into the third age of humankind when the Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan high cultures flourished — Frederick Lenz
By the time the Egyptian civilization had begun to flourish, the earth's aura had already become so dense it was impossible to discover the secret meditation techniques. — Frederick Lenz
Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it. — Zahi Hawass
If the Egyptian people can create a democracy in the heart of the Arab world, it will be a more significant contribution to civilization than the great pyramids. — Lindsey Graham
The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth - Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu. — Joseph McCabe
Syria is already in the grips of a civil war, unfortunately enough, and Egypt is moving in that direction. We would like to see the Egyptian people avoid this fate. — Vladimir Putin
The Ancient Egyptians were not fools, Carter. They built the pyramids. They created the first great nation state. Their civilization lasted thousands of years.” “Yeah,” I said. “And now they’re gone. — Rick Riordan
Ancient Greek Quotes
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. — Pericles
Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal. — Alexander The Great
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. — Vladimir Lenin
As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how. — Max Tegmark
The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. — John F. Kennedy
We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ...sophisticated.' — Paul Provenza
Chaos does not mean total disorder. Chaos means a multiplicity of possibilities. Chaos is from the ancient Greek words that means a thing that is birthed from the void. And it was about that which is possible, not about disorder. — Jok Church
Few men have the natural strength to honor a friend's success without envy. — Aeschylus
Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind. — Winston Churchill
Greece Quotes
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls--the World. — Lord Byron
I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt. — Roald Dahl
Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another. — Homer
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
The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellos (Greece) because they do not study the whole person. — Socrates
Your ancestors invaded Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury; ... [and] I have been appointed leader of the Greeks. — Arrian
We are not only talking about waves of refugees coming to Greece, to Italy, and elsewhere. Destabilizing the Balkans means Lebanonization, and that means destabilizing all of Europe. — Fatos Nano
Shall I pass by and leave you lying there because of the expedition you led against Greece, or shall I set you up again because of your magnanimity and your virtues in other respects? — Alexander The Great
If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country. — George Papandreou
Albania, Macedonia and Greece have managed to create a good partnership in the south of the Continent and are making progress in blocking the spread of the conflict. But any spillover could destroy this European-oriented partnership and create problems for the European Union countries themselves. — Fatos Nano
Greek Mythology Quotes
Being a hero doesn’t mean you’re invincible. It just means that you’re brave enough to stand up and do what’s needed. — Rick Riordan
According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves. — Plato
I'm obsessed with Greek mythology. My favorite goddess is Artemis. She's strong and reminds me of Katniss, the heroine of The Hunger Games. — Isabelle Fuhrman
II know a little about Greek mythology. It's not that far away from the Nordic mythology. — Sayings
In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology — Barack Obama
Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue. — Tom Robbins
Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks. — Alistair Cooke
..,No love cannot leave where there is no trust..,~cupid and psyche..,"Greek mythology of Edith Hamilton — Edith Hamilton
In Greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost strength. So it is with engineers. They must not become isolated from the real world... — Hyman Rickover
It did remind me of something out of Greek mythology - the richest king who gets everything he wants, but ultimately his family has a curse on it from the Gods. — Martin Scorsese
Roman Civilization Quotes
You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, protect it,and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman Legions did - by putting your soldiers in the mud. — T. R. Fehrenbach
I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C. — D. H. Lawrence
If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse. — Cory Booker
That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society. — Edward Gibbon
This scripture [Romans 13:1-6] is wrested from the scope of God's Spirit, and the nature of the place, and cannot truly be interpreted to mean that the power of the civil magistrate may be exercised in spiritual or soul matters. — Roger Williams
Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today. — Arthur Erickson
My last days at MGM were like the fall of the Roman Empire in fast motion. — Joseph Barbera
In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements, - into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion. — Edward Everett
We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization. — Herbert Read
I'm sure back in the Greek days or the Roman Empire days, when guys fought in arenas and were fighting lions, people were talking smack. Every era in history has someone talking smack. No way you can have talent and not proclaim your victory. — J. B. Smoove
Ancient Civilizations Quotes
How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today. — Arundhati Roy
If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay. — Theodore Roosevelt
Atlantis was a highly evolved civilization where the sciences and arts were far more advanced than one might guess. Atlantis was technologically advanced in genetic engineering, computer science, inter-dimensional physics, and artistically developed with electronic music and crystal art forms. — Frederick Lenz
Long before the advent of what scientists and scholars consider to be the beginning of human civilization, there was an age undreamed of ... the age of Atlantis. — Frederick Lenz
They wanted to preserve and protect the mystical knowledge gained from their meditation practices and pass it on to future civilizations they clairvoyantly saw were going to be born after the destruction of Atlantis — Frederick Lenz
In their meditations, the high priests and priestesses of Atlantis had seen that the Atlantean civilization was going to end cataclysmically. — Frederick Lenz
It was their intention to start twelve new civilizations similar to Atlantis in these locations. — Frederick Lenz
There were many stages to the Atlantean civilization. During the later stages, scientists became involved with advanced particle physics. In particular they were interested in reverse gravity fields. — Frederick Lenz
In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization. — Nikola Tesla
Syria is the proud heir of an ancient civilization that has a unique spectrum of minorities that encompasses Muslims and Christians of various denominations. There are at least ten such ethnic and religious groups. — Ahmed H. Zewail
The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions. — Karl Popper
Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation. — Karl Marx
All the wonders of the Greek civilization heaped together are less wonderful than the single book of Psalms. Greece had all that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise blossomed in Palestine alone. — William E. Gladstone
We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex — Marion Zimmer Bradley
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded. — Simone Weil
My point is, as civilization is progressing, Mosaic law came down from the mountain, was handed to civilization, it emerged through the Greek civilization as the Greeks were developing their Age of Reason. And we're talking about the foundation of Western Civilization, and almost concurrently with that, Roman law was emerging as well. — Steve King
In all of Western civilization, there have been societies that celebrating the homosexuality, the ancient Greeks. But they, in fact, protected the institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. They got the joke. And the American people get the joke. — Ken Blackwell
The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people. — Charles Darwin
Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships. — Stanislaw Ulam
The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters. — Simon Sebag-Montefiore
Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture. — W. E. B. Du Bois
What I tried to show is that this idea of this fundamental conflict between savagery and civilization goes back to the very beginnings of Western history. I go back to the Greeks, I go back to the Romans. You can read Homer. And of course Homer has his great heroes involved in this myth, this wonderful mythic contest with savage tribal peoples, half-human monsters on distant parts of the world. — Robert A. Williams, Jr.
I did have the resource of having taught Greek mythology and the history of Western civilization, and you can go back into the plays of Aeschylus and follow what happens when people seek revenge, and there are people plucking their eyes out. And Greek mythology is filled with all kinds of monsters and whatnot. — Wes Craven
Under the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the power ofpersons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before the Greeks were the Tamils. The Tamils are one of the oldest civilizations thats still surviving. — M.I.A.
It ought to be remembered by all [that] the Games more than 2,000 years ago started as a means of bringing peace between the Greek city-states. And in those days, even if a war was going on, they called off the war in order to hold the Games. I wish we were still as civilized. — Ronald Reagan
Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious. — W. H. Auden
I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations. — Tim Blake Nelson
What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the Greeks? — Jean-Baptiste Say
Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece. — Tom Standage
The famous Greek physician Hippocrates administered musical treatments to his patients in 400 B.C. Although this type of treatment did not originate with him, it found in him an exponent of the highest order. With the increasing materialism of Western civilization, the major tenants of ancient musical therapy have been either forgotten or discarded. — Corinne Heline
A legacy that powerful does not disappear. Next to the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans were babies. Our modern nations like Great Britain and America? Blinks of an eye...The very oldest root of civilization, at least of Western civilization, is Egypt. Look at the pyramid on the dollar bill. Look at the Washington Monument—the world’s largest Egyptian obelisk. Egypt is still.......very much alive. — Rick Riordan
Answer my question, Bacchus. I’m not one of your dickless Greeks to be kept waiting for an answer. (Camulus) You better take a more civil tone with me, Cam. I’m not one of your flaccid Celts to shake in terror of your wrath. You want to fight, boy, bring it on. (Dionysus) Whoa, hang on a second. Let’s save the fighting for when you two take over the world, okay? (Styxx) — Sherrilyn Kenyon
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of greek civilization quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about greek civilization to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of greek civilization quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.