A Quote by Donald Kagan

We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics.

Donald Kagan

Quote Topics

Area Because Certain Certain Things Degree Greeks Inherited Like Politics Romans Some Striking Them Things Whole

Quote Author

Donald Kagan
American - Historian
Born: 1932

I think the Greeks first took astrology to India and took from the Hindus the science of astronomy and carried it back with them from Europe. Because in India you will find old altars made according to a certain geometrical plan, and certain things had to be done when the stars were in certain positions, therefore I think the Greeks gave the Hindus astrology, and the Hindus gave them astronomy.

Swami Vivekananda

Well, I'm trained as a classicist, so I like to read the Greeks and Romans.

Martha Nussbaum

... the whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

Storm Jameson

History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It's not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say.

Mary Beard

Some like them hot,some like them cold. Some like them when they're not to darn old Some like them fat,some like them lean. Some like them only at sweet sixteen. Some like them dark,some like them light. Some like them in the park,late at night. Some like them fickle,some like them true, But the time I like them is when they're like you

Ring Lardner

The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church.

Octavio Paz

One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.

Gertrude Stein

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

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A lot of people think I don't like them just because I'm pretty quiet. But there are certain things people don't necessarily need to know. There's got to be some things for me.

Carrie Underwood

I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. 2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living.

John Crowe Ransom

One of the things that I think you see sometimes in politics is a certain degree of caution. It's usually advised by consultants who don't want to see you march to the end of a limb.

Elizabeth Edwards

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons, or Celts, Can't seem just to say anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.

Ogden Nash

I do not feel that the West has really become less condescending toward foreign cultures than the Greeks and Romans were: it has only become more tolerant. Mind you, not toward Islam—only toward certain other Eastern cultures, which offer some sort of spiritual attraction to the spirit-hungry West and are, at the same time, too distant from the Western world-view to constitute any real challenge to its values.