Ancient Quotes - Page 12

• What America needs is to hold to its ancient and well-charted course. Our country was conceived in the theory of local self-government. It has been dedicated by long practice to that wise and beneficent policy. It is the foundation principle of our system of liberty. It makes the largest promise to the freedom and development of the individual. Its preservation is worth all the effort and all the sacrifice that it may cost.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Wise, Country, Sacrifice

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• The history of ancient and modern republics had taught them that many of the evils which those republics suffered arose from the want of a certain balance, and that mutual control indispensable to a wise administration. They were convinced that popular assemblies are frequently misguided by ignorance, by sudden impulses, and the intrigues of ambitious men; and that some firm barrier against these operations was necessary. They, therefore, instituted your Senate.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Wise, Ignorance, Men

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• But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind - too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

  Ronald Reagan

  Freedom, Hatred, Liberty

  Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, delivered 12 June 1987, West Berlin

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• Happy he who far from business persuits
  Tills and re-tills his ancestral lands
  With oxen of his own breeding
  Having no slavish yoke about his neck.

  Horace

  Oxen, Land, Yoke

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• The helicopter is probably the most versatile instrument ever invented by man. It approaches closer than any other to fulfillment of mankind's ancient dreams of the flying horse and the magic carpet.

  Igor Sikorsky

  Dream, Horse, Men

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• No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

  Michael Parenti

  Years, Practice, Culture

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• There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Knowing, Humanity

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.208, Vintage

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• We in this country, in this generation, areby destiny rather than choicethe watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of peace on earth, good will toward men. That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

  John F. Kennedy

  Country, Peace, Wall

  Undelivered Speech to the Dallas Citizens Council, delivered 22 November 1963, Trade Mart, Dallas, Texas

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• Thus we conclude, that the strata both primary and secondary, both those of ancient and those of more recent origin, have had their materials furnished from the ruins of former continents, from the dissolution of rocks, or the destruction of animal or vegetable bodies, similar, at least in some respects, to those that now occupy the surface of the earth.

  John Playfair

  Science, Animal, Rocks

  John Playfair, James George Playfair (1822). “Biographical memoir. Illustrations of the Huttonian theory of the earth”, p.32

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• Bill Monroe spoke of bringing 'ancient tones' into his music with echoes of British and Irish fiddle and bagpipe music, while also delving deeply into American blues, gospel, folk hymnody, and hill country dance music. To that gumbo, he added the invigorating rhythms and harmonies of hot jazz. It was a new kind of American music, named in honor of his band The Blue Grass Boys to be known, simply, as bluegrass.

  Paul Zollo

  Music, Country, Boys

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• When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland. When I went to Sderot and saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year-old boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket, and when I walked among the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map - face of the Earth.

  Barack Obama

  Prayer, Children, Wall

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• Now a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is - One Who Killed Our Lord. And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagan or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce.

  Lenny Bruce

  Christian, Deuces, Tribes

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• The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

  Northrop Frye

  Kings, Stupid, Sheep

  Northrop Frye (2015). “Anatomy of Criticism”, p.143, Princeton University Press

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• I am a hunter. Not merely 'a person who hunts', but someone to whom this ancient, natural and honorable activity is an essential and deeply meaningful part of life.

  David Petersen

  Meaningful, Essentials, Hunters

  David Petersen (2014). “Racks: A Natural History of Antlers and the Animals That Wear Them”, p.114, Booktango

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• My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

  John Dominic Crossan

  Smart, People, Dumb

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• If we raise a generation of students who dont believe in the process of science, who think everything that weve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, youre not going to continue to innovate.

  Bill Nye

  Believe, Thinking, Generations

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• I didn't have an identity. It was manufactured. My identity now? It was written on the wall by ancient forces.

  Robert Downey, Jr.

  Wall, Identity, Force

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• I'd always liked the idea that drama acts at its best as a kind of arena for debate, not just about the thing itself, but also producing aesthetic, stylistic, political and moral discussions. The Jungian view would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.

  Jeremy Northam

  Memories, Drama, Views

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• We live in the Age of the Higher Brain, the cerebral cortex that has grown enormously over the last few millennia, overshadowing the ancient, instinctive lower brain. The cortex is often called the new brain, yet the old brain held sway in humans for millions of years, as it does today in most living things. The old brain can't conjure up ideas or read. But it does possess the power to feel and, above all, to be. It was the old brain that caused our forebears to sense the closeness of a mysterious presence everywhere in Nature.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Years, Ideas

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• You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Wall, Lying, Germany

  "Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics". Book by Charles Krauthammer, 2013).

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• Republicans stand by their convictions. Stupid, ignorant, world-destroying convictions based on disproven economic fantasies and ancient books full of primitive morality and magic people. But convictions, nonetheless.

  Bill Maher

  Stupid, Book, People

  Bill Maher (2011). “The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass”, p.238, Penguin

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• The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges : the pox and Christianity.

  Adolf Hitler

  Light, Two, World

  Adolf Hitler (1972). “Secret conversations, 1941-1944”, Octagon Press, Limited

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• None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.

  Edmund Crispin

  Character, Cities, Oxford

  Edmund Crispin (2014). “The Moving Toyshop”, p.6, A&C Black

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• There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.

  Floyd Red Crow Westerman

  Life, Truth, Memories

  "Fictional character: Albert Hosteen". "The X-Files", (1993–2002, 2016–18), Season 3. The Blessing Way [3.01], September 22, 1995.

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• In ancient cultures, they didn*t practice theory in their dances; they wanted to arrive at a state of trance, and I think that's an appropriate approach for the arts: to create a work that is entrancing.

  Reza Abdoh

  Art, Thinking, Practice

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