A Quote by David Sedaris
The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.
Related Quotes
My father loved democracy. He loved the ancient Greeks because they invented democracy, and he shared their contempt for those who refused to participate in the political process.
The interesting thing is that the 82% of the Greeks do not want to abandon the Euro. They really believe that there might be some kind of magical way where we could stay in the Eurozone but do not do our homework. This is not possible. So what we are trying to do is explain, you know, we in Greece invented democracy but we also invented at the same time populism.
Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.
Eratosthenes was the director of the great library of Alexandria, the Centre of science and learning in the ancient world. Aristotle had argued that humanity was divided into Greeks and everybody else, whom he called barbarians and that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. He thought it was fitting for the Greeks to enslave other peoples. But Erathosthenes criticized Aristotle for his blind chauvinism, he believed there was good and bad in every nation.
By the time writing was invented, the Greeks and Egyptians had already learned to extract opium from poppies to facilitate sleep.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
I think the Greeks invented sports as an antidote to philosophy.
So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more violent.
I do believe that what I have called populist democracy is to be preferred to what I have called elitist democracy.
The Greeks had had vast experience in this world, their imagination had been fertile and they had created much...that, in these circumstances, they should fall in with a people imbued with a calm and sometimes stolid and bucolic certainty where its spiritual possessions were concerned, barbarians with no sculpture or breeding, necessarily tinged their contempt with impotent wrath. The inevitably logical result of this attitude on the part of the Greeks was the growth of anti-Semitism, of hatred of the Jews.
Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth.
I couldn't have invented crisps. ... I don't really want to be known as the man who invented crisps. ... I invented apples. ... I invented pandas, and caps. I invented soil.
'The Cape' is a really good comic! They invented the whole character, and now they've built a book of 'The Cape' for the show. When I was a kid, I used to love Batman, and I loved Spider-Man. My favorite was this guy called Judge Dredd. I know they made a movie of that in the '90s.
We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient Christianism, which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles after miracles have rolled down in torrents, wave succeeding wave in the Catholic church, from the Council of Nicea, and long before, to this day.
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