Alterations Quote by Edward Gibbon

The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not…

— John Dewey

“The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin,…

— Edward Gibbon

“The Greeks would, as it were, devote festivals to all their passions and evil natural inclinations… they took these human, all too human aspects…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The Romans were distinguished for their genius for law-giving and government, the Greeks for philosophy, art, and mental culture generally.”

— James Elliott

“Homeric Greece and everything that philosophy after Plato stood for was, however superficially cordial and continuous, in fact deeply antagonistic, if often at the…

— Walter J. Ong

“In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after a meal,…

— Alain de Botton

“As you can imagine, the wandering Sophists created bitter wrangling in Athens by pointing out that there were no absolute norms for what was…

— Jostein Gaarder

“The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death.”

— Antal Szerb

Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible…

— Lord Acton

“The entrenched interests of the regional nobility prevented the proper functioning of a government built upon ethical practice. While high-minded scholars often called for…

— Joan Stanley-Baker

“If you will bear in mind that Socrates, the best of the pagans, knew of no higher criterion for men, of no better guide…

— Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

There was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. Their virtues were great and noble, and these virtues madethem great…

— Herman Melville