{"quotes":[{"text":"OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith them I lived with, cursed in my killing.","author":"Sophocles","tags":["ancient-greece","sophocles","tragedy"],"id":19284,"author_id":"Sophocles"},{"text":"It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.","author":"Karl Marx","tags":["ancient-greece","catholic","catholic-saints","classics","destruction","heathendom","history","manuscripts","monks","saints"],"id":53741,"author_id":"Karl+Marx"},{"text":"In other words if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. One can see how this worked at its starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the story of an army of Greek mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers, and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest.","author":"David Graeber","tags":["ancient-greece","elections","military","power","voting"],"id":60149,"author_id":"David+Graeber"},{"text":"JOCASTA:So clear in this case were the oracles,so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say;what God discovers need of, easilyhe shows to us himself.","author":"Sophocles","tags":["ancient-greece","sophocles","tragedy"],"id":75175,"author_id":"Sophocles"},{"text":"...Like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.","author":"Homer","tags":["ancient-greece","poem"],"id":121962,"author_id":"Homer"},{"text":"CHORUS:You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.","author":"Sophocles","tags":["ancient-greece","sophocles","tragedy"],"id":154087,"author_id":"Sophocles"},{"text":"I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark.","author":"George MacDonald Fraser","tags":["achilles","ajax","ancient-greece","greek-heroes","hero","martiality"],"id":162625,"author_id":"George+MacDonald+Fraser"},{"text":"I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. We show greatness not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.","author":"Blaise Pascal","tags":["ancient-greece","france","philosophy","tension","virtue","virtues"],"id":195170,"author_id":"Blaise+Pascal"},{"text":"It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.","author":"Mary Renault","tags":["ancient-greece","kings","pittheus","power","troizen"],"id":198959,"author_id":"Mary+Renault"},{"text":"The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong.The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. 'If I am the wisest man,' said Socrates, 'it is because I alone know that I know nothing.' The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.Alas, none of this was new to me. (There is very little that is new to me; I wish my correspondents would realize this.) This particular theme was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who specialized in irritating me. He also told me that all theories are proven wrong in time.My answer to him was, 'John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.","author":"Isaac Asimov","tags":["ancient-greece","earth","flat-earth","greece","ignorance","knowledge","relativity","science","scientific-theory","socrates","theory","understanding","universe","wisdom","wrong"],"id":209859,"author_id":"Isaac+Asimov"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":23,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}