When we speak of beauty, we're speaking of something we're more or less indifferent to.

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.

In every civilization, life grows easier. Men grow lazier in consequence. We have a picture of what happened to the individual Greek. (I cannot look at history, or at any human action, except as I look at the individual.) The Greeks had good food, good witty talk, pleasant dinner parties; and they were content. When the individual man had reached that condition in Athens, when the thought not of giving to the state but of what the state could give to him, Athens' freedom was doomed.

Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.

Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.

The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.