The mention of Greece fills the mind with the most exalted sentiments and arouses in our bosoms the best feelings of which our nature is capable. ~ James Monroe
From the sacred bones of the Hellenes arisen, and valiant again as you once were, hail! Oh hail, Liberty! ~ Dionysios Solomos
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence. ~ John Milton
Hellas belongs to the Hellenes. ~ Andreas Papandreou
Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium. ~ Horace
Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas and did us great harm. ~ Alexander the Great

Greece or Hellas, officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Ellīnikī́ Dīmokratía, IPA: [eliniˈki ðimokraˈtia]), is a country and state in southeastern Europe. Situated on the southern end of the Balkan peninsula, Greece has land borders with Albania, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of mainland Greece, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Modern Greece traces its roots to the civilisation of ancient Greece, generally considered the cradle of western civilization. As such, it is the birthplace of Democracy, western philosophy, the Olympic Games, western literature and historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles and western drama, including tragedy and comedy.

Quotes

A

  • Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas 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, Alexander's letter to Persian king Darius III of Persia in response to a truce plea, as quoted in Anabasis Alexandri by Arrian; translated as Anabasis of Alexander by P. A. Brunt, for the "Loeb Edition" Book II 14, 4

B

C

D

  • And the hairy he-goat [stands for] the king of Greece; and as for the great horn that was between its eyes, it [stands for] the first king. And that one having been broken, so that there were four that finally stood up instead of it, there are four kingdoms from [his] nation that will stand up, but not with his power.
  • There will yet be three kings standing up for Persia, and the fourth one will amass greater riches than all [others]. And as soon as he has become strong in his riches, he will rouse up everything against the kingdom of Greece.
  • Repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners is an ancient feeling among men. It is peculiar to no particular race or nation. It is met with, not only in the conduct of one nation towards another, but in the conduct of the inhabitants of the different parts of the same country, some times of the same city, and even of the same village. 'Lands intersected by a narrow frith abhor each other. Mountains interposed, make enemies of nations'. To the Greek, every man not speaking Greek is a barbarian. To the Jew, everyone not circumcised is a gentile. To the Mohametan, everyone not believing in the Prophet is a kaffer.

E

  • Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire's efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.
  • The kingdom of Greece was a terror to the world, but Mattathias the priest, with faith and not with weapons, boldly met the terror and defeated it.
  • 'Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the woman?' (Song, 6. 10). She is no other than Esther, who like the morning star was the light brought to Israel in the dark days of Media. 'Clear as the sun and terrible as an army with banners' (Song, 6. 10): these were no other than Mattathias the High Priest and his sons, who like an army with their banners stood up against the evil power of Greece, from which every power fled as one flees from the strength of the mid-day sun. Their army and their banners were faith in their God; they were stimulated by the words of the prophet (Joel 4. 6-10), 'The children of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians . . . Beat your ploughshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am strong.'

G

  • One after another, countries such as Spain and Greece, states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Kansas, and American colonies such as Puerto Rico-are becoming laboratories for how much pain can be inflicted on a population for the purpose of satisfying creditors and ideologues.
    • Amy Goodman Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2016)

H

  • Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.
  • Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.
  • Horace, Book II, epistle i, lines 156–157

J

  • Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked good. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mister Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long.
    • Lyndon Baines Johnson, comment to the Greek ambassador to the United States, Alexander Matsas, over the Cypriot issue (June 1964). As quoted in I Should Have Died (1977) by Philip Deane, pp. 113-114.

K

L

  • The same, yet not the same — her face
    Has still that Grecian line ;
    The sculptured perfectness whose grace
    Has long been held divine.
  • 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?

M

  • Greek nationalists in the early nineteenth century, and their supporters in Europe, took it for granted that they were freeing the heirs of classical Greek civilization from the Ottoman Empire. Surely history would grant them a second chance. Greek scholars wrote books showing that there was a direct line from the classical world to the modern. (The four centuries of Ottoman rule were largely overlooked.) Foreign scholars who suggested that such a view was too simplistic were pilloried or ignored. Written Greek was modelled on the classical and so generations of schoolchildren struggled with a language that was very different from the one they spoke. It was only in 1976 that the government finally conceded and made modern Greek the official language.
  • More dangerously, the past held the promise of a reborn Greek empire. Eleutherios Venizelos, the leading Greek statesman at the time of World War I, once gathered his friends around a map and drew the outlines of the ancient Greece, at the height of its influence, across the modern borders. His outline included most of modern Turkey, a good part of Albania, and most of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. (He could have but did not also include parts of Italy.) Under the influence of that great (megali) idea, he sent Greek soldiers to Asia Minor in 1919 to stake out Greece’s claims. The result was a catastrophe for the Greek armies and for all those innocent Greeks who had lived for generations in what became modern Turkey. As the resurgent Turkish armies under Kemal Atatürk pressed the Greek forces back, hundreds of thousands of bewildered refugees, many ofwhom barely knew Greek, followed them. In turn, huge numbers of Turks, many distinguished from their Greek neighbours only by their religion, abandoned their homes and villages for Turkey. The events of those years have in turn become part of history and have poisoned relations between Greece and Turkey up to the present.
  • The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflict, are now one of the most important war assets of the U.S./NATO front. Many countries have also been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on.
  • Greece is one of the rare countries of the EU that does not recognize the phrase "minority rights." They still have a concept of a pure nation—one state, one nation, one religion, one culture, everything Greek. And they do not want to recognize that in Greece there is a big Turkish minority, a big Albanian minority and one small Macedonian minority.
  • Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
    and eloquence.
  • The mention of Greece fills the mind with the most exalted sentiments and arouses in our bosoms the best feelings of which our nature is capable.

P

  • The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time that they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind.

R

S

T

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 342.

  • Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
    Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime,
    Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
    Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?
  • The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
    Where burning Sappho loved and sung.
    Where grew the arts of war and peace, —
    Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
    Eternal summer gilds them yet,
    But all, except their sun, is set.
  • Such is the aspect of this shore;
    "Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!
    So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
    We start, for soul is wanting there.

See also

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