Voices Looking at Greece Not as proof. As recognition.
Voices from the World on Greece and Greek Culture
Anthony Eden
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
“It was said in Athens two thousand years ago that the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.
The Greeks, through their ‘No’s’, give new life to their great classical tradition.”
Arthur C. Clarke
“If the insight of the Greeks had matched their genius, the Industrial Revolution might have begun a thousand years before Columbus.
In our own time, we would not merely be circling the Moon, but might already have reached other nearby planets.”
Arthur Koestler
“Before the Pythagoreans, no one had conceived that mathematical relationships held the secret of the universe.
Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still both blessed and burdened by their legacy.
In non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power seems never to have arisen.”
(On “Enthusiasm” — anonymous formulation, commonly attributed)
“The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things.
They gave us one of the most beautiful words in our language: enthusiasm, from en-theos — ‘the god within’.
The greatness of human action is measured by the inspiration from which it springs.
Blessed is the one who carries a god within.”
George Bernard Shaw
“If your home library does not contain the works of the ancient Greek writers, then you live in a house without light.”
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
German philologist
“The Greek nation stands at the forefront of humanity.”
Leonard Bloomfield
Linguist
“Where other peoples take things for granted, the Greeks possess the gift of wonder.”
C. M. Bowra
Warden of Wadham College, Oxford
“The Greeks are an almost mythical people, occupying a privileged position in the development of European civilization.”
Émile Brun
French philosopher
“The roots of the tree of life and knowledge lie in the land of Greece.”
Jacob Bryant
British scholar
“Greece was the true cradle of freedom, where the first states were forged. We are the pupils of those great men in the principles of science, morality, and good governance.”
J. B. Bury
Historian, Cambridge
“We owe everything to the Greeks. They were the first to apply criticism to facts. They founded history, poetry, letters, art, philosophy — and thus, history itself.”
Lord Byron
“Had it not been for Greece, we might still be barbarians and idolaters.”
Albert Camus
“Greece taught us first that free people can be brave, and that no defeat is final. This small nation proved worthy of its history.”
Cicero
“Greece surpassed us in learning and in literature.”
Georges Clemenceau
“The Greeks are a small people, but great in their culture, having benefited humanity throughout the ages.”
Bill Clinton
“We are all Greeks.”
Cotineau
“Greece is like those exquisite drinks: once you taste them, you never forget them.”
Jacqueline de Romilly
“Where the modern world speaks of rights, the Greeks spoke of duty.”
Edith Hamilton
American educator and author
“I came early to the Greeks and found answers in them. The great men of Greece directed all their actions toward the immortality of the soul. We do not truly act as if we believed in the immortality of the soul, and that is why we are where we are.”
Egger
“Civilized nations are the moral descendants of the proud and brilliant Greeks.”
T. S. Eliot
“European literature has Greek and Latin blood. These are not two different systems of circulation, but one. For through Rome one can trace our Greek origin.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The Earth bears the Parthenon proudly, as the finest ornament upon her girdle.”
Frederick the Great of Prussia
“We are children of the Greeks.”
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
“Europe without Greece is like a child without a birth certificate.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The Greeks are our teachers; I admire them as unsurpassed minds.”
“The Greeks are my kin, they are my teachers. I admire them as unparalleled masters of expression and form, and for their ideal way of life. What the heart and mind are to the body, Greece is to humanity.”
“Damned Greek, how small and insignificant I am before you!”
Mikhail Gorbachev
“We all originate from Greece; that is where our roots lie.”
Henry Miller
American writer
“To those who think that Greece today has no importance, I must say that they could not be more mistaken. Modern Greece, like ancient Greece, is of the highest importance to anyone seeking to discover himself.”
Adolf Hitler
“The future of humanity lies in the combination of German technology and the Greek spirit.”
(Presented here strictly as a historical quotation, not as endorsement.)
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Prussian diplomat and philosopher
“Only among the Greeks do we find the idea of what we would wish to be and to produce. From the Greeks we take something more than earthly — almost divine. For us, the Greeks stand outside the cycle of history. Knowledge of the Greeks is not merely pleasant, useful, or necessary; in them alone we find the image of what we ought to wish to be and to create.”
Jean Marving
“The closer I move toward the end of my life, the more deeply I feel bound to Greece. The very idea of her ennobles me and makes me almost immaterial.”
Jonathan Miller
American who fought in Greece as a volunteer.
“I have lived as a Greek, and with the Greeks I am prepared to suffer for the cause of religion and freedom. My life is devoted to the overthrow of the Turkish Empire. God is on the side of the Greeks.”
Immanuel Kant
“Mathematics as a science found its path among the admirable people of the Greeks. The observation that the Egyptians had no conception of geometry as a science is reinforced by their inability to calculate the height of the pyramids.”
Leland Stone
“For the Greeks, freedom is life itself, and death is merely an episode.”
Liddell
“The Greek landscape is the most beautiful consolation for one who mourns a lost paradise.”
Livingstone
“Hellenism—and the world—owe to Plato the survival of civilization. He is the father of the great philosophical systems of Hellenism, which so profoundly influenced human life. Among all peoples, only the Greeks dreamed the dream of an excellent life. The most characteristic quality of the Greeks is beauty.”
Ludwig I of Bavaria
“Whatever is most wondrous in the annals of the world is connected with Greece. O Greece, homeland of the most illustrious heroes, glory of the Muses, womb of the inimitable arts, admiration of the world.”
André Malraux
“There is a hidden Greece in the heart of every European.”
Mackenzie King
Prime Minister of Canada
“When the cradle of the noblest civilization known to humanity—the country to which we owe all that makes life higher and more beautiful—is subjected to such an attack, the place of all true people is at her side.”
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
“The leadership of humanity’s civilization unquestionably belongs to the Greek nation.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
From The Birth of Tragedy
“I wish that the Germans, instead of being Hellenizing phantoms, might become Greeks. Of all human races, the most perfect, the most beautiful, the most justifiably enviable, the most enchanting—those who most carry us away—are the Greeks. Like a charioteer guiding the chariot, they hold in their hands the reins of our art.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (extended passage)
“In every period of its development, Western European culture has attempted to free itself from the Greeks. This attempt is permeated with deep resentment, because whatever it created—seemingly original and worthy of admiration—lost color and life when compared to the Greek model, shrank, and ended up resembling a cheap copy, a caricature. […] All the poisons of envy, arrogance, and hatred have proved insufficient to disturb their magnificent beauty. Thus, people continue to feel shame and fear before the Greeks. […] The Greeks are the charioteers of every emerging civilization, and almost always both the chariots and the horses of later civilizations are of far poorer quality than the charioteers themselves, who ultimately take delight in driving the chariot toward the abyss, which they themselves overcome with an Achilles-like leap.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (alternative formulation)
“With a great, genius people, the same occurs as with a genius individual. Even the smallest expressions of life bear the mark of genius. The Greeks are like genius itself: simple. That is why they are immortal teachers. Their institutions and creations bear the stamp of simplicity—so much so that one often stands in awe at how uniquely simple they are. And, paradoxically, they are just as deep as they are simple. […] The world may be as dark as it wishes, but it suffices to interpose a fragment of Greek life, and it is immediately flooded with light… We shall try to learn from the Greeks, and we shall teach by guiding ourselves by their example. This will be our task.”
Pieshaud
“We cannot deny the spirit we received from Greece without risking the loss of our civilization forever.”
Luigi Pirandello
“I am from Sicily, that is, from Greater Greece, and there is still much of Greece in Sicily.
Measure, rhythm, and harmony still live there.
Moreover, I myself am of Greek origin.
Yes, yes — do not be surprised: my family name is Pyrángelos; Pirandello is nothing but a phonetic alteration of Pyrántzelo.”
Salvatore Quasimodo
“I believe that genuine, spiritual people originate from Greece.
To Greece they owe their civilization, the clarity of their thought, and above all a philosophically grounded approach to life and to human problems.”
Frederico Sagredo
Basque writer and politician
“Western civilization was born in Greece and, both at its origin and throughout its future development, has always remained Greek — never the result of contributions from any other region or nation.
For this reason, it is not enough merely to know Greek linguistic terms; these are often forgotten.
The Romans used to say that Greece was the mother of all knowledge, and this truth has not changed since.”
Friedrich von Schiller
“The study of Plutarch elevates the flaccid humanity of our age, making it better and more vital.
The Greeks astonish us not only through their simplicity, which is foreign to our times. They are at the same time our rivals — often our models — precisely in those points of superiority from which we seek relief when we regret the artificial character of our own ways.
We see admirable human beings who, by uniting wholeness of form with wholeness of substance — philosophical and creative, gentle and powerful — impart youthful vitality to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.”
(An alternative formulation attributed to him):
“Wherever I turn my thoughts, wherever I direct my soul, I see you before me, I find you.
I long for Art — Poetry, Theatre, Architecture — and there you stand, first and unsurpassed.
I seek Science — Mathematics, Philosophy, Medicine — and again you are supreme and unrivalled.
I thirst for Democracy, for Equality before the Law, and once more you stand before me, incomparable and unshadowed.
Accursed Greek, accursed Knowledge! Why did I touch you? To feel how small I am, insignificant, nothing? Why do you not leave me to my misery and my careless peace?”
Heinrich Schliemann
“Everything I did, I did in order to revive my beloved Greece.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
English poet
“We are all Greeks. Our laws, our religion, our literature, and our arts have their roots in Greece.
Greece came into the world to represent, in the most perfect form, the beauty of moral and intellectual life.
The Greeks are our teachers and creators — gods for us to worship.”
Siegfried (reference to Marathon)
“When the Greeks fought at Marathon against the spiritually incoherent mass of the Persian satrap, they fought as a people fully conscious of their right to a free political life.
At Marathon, the consciousness of humanity regarding the citizen as the bearer not only of obligations but also of rights was born.
We, the people of the West, must reverently bow our knees at this place where human dignity was founded.”
Eduard Spranger
“German individuality, in order to become a nation — that is, a people with national consciousness — sought the assistance of the Greek spirit.”
André Tardieu
“By the term ‘civilization’ we express the fundamental conditions of the physical and moral life of peoples.
The basic concepts of Greek civilization constitute our moral capital.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Without knowledge of Greek, there is no true education.”
Giuseppe Ungaretti
“Greece is, and will remain for eternity, the inexhaustible source of the highest forms of thought.”
Peter Ustinov
“The world would be much poorer without Greece.”
Victor Hugo
“It is beautiful to descend from Greece — the land that gave light to humanity.”
“The world is an expanding Greece, and Greece is a contracting world.”
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
“In ancient Greece lived men who were like gods.
To become a human being, one must first become Greek.”
Vogue
French archaeologist and diplomat
“Wherever in the world Greeks may be, they remember their homeland.
Their soul is never exiled.”
Voltaire
“Defend Greece, for to her we owe our enlightenment, our sciences, our arts, and our virtues.”
(On the Greek language):
“The Greek language ought to become the international language of Europe.”
Johann Gottfried von Herder
“Just as flowers adorn the earth and stars adorn the sky, so Greece adorns humanity.”
H. G. Wells
“Greece was rightly called the land of wonders.
Perhaps the greatest of these wonders is the way in which it remains faithful to its traditions while renewing its glorious past from century to century.”
Alain Juppé (or an alternative attribution to a French statesman)
“Greece is the dazzling light.
Through her, all questions are resolved and all clouds disperse.”
Aeschylus (through a later rendering)
“For we, unlike the barbarians, never count the number of the enemy.
We always say: ‘this number too is sufficient,’ and we rush into battle.
It is enough that the Greeks be united.
Then we become invincible.”
Constantine Cavafy
“There is no honor more precious than being Greek.”
Ioannis Makriyannis
“From beginning to end, all the beasts fight to devour us — and they cannot.
They eat from us, and still there is leaven left.”
George Seferis (paraphrasing Makriyannis)
“So far, we have all set out to devour Greece.
The level of this nourishment keeps falling.
Soon, she will begin to devour us.”
