Byzantine Quotes

• People expect Byzantine, Machiavellian logic from politicians. But the truth is simple. Trial lawyers learn a good rule: 'Don't decide what you don't have to decide.' That's not evasion, it's wisdom.

  Mario Cuomo

  Simple, People, Political

  "The Quotable Politician". Book by William Whitman, p. 25, 2003.

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• Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Change, Eye, Opportunity

  Nikos Kazantzakis (2012). “Report to Greco”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• [In] the national and religious conflict of the [Byzantine and Saracen] empires, peace was without confidence, and war without mercy.

  Edward Gibbon

  Religious, War, Empires

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• Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Children, Eye, Reality

  Nikos Kazantzakis (2012). “Report to Greco”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• I maintain, then, that we should make peace, not only with the Chians, the Rhodians, the Byzantines and the Coans, but with all mankind.

  Isocrates

  Peace, Should, Mankind

  Isocrates (1962). “Isocrates”, Loeb Classical Library

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• The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Believe, Men

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• I suppose the most marked example of color as structure is in the Byzantine use of mosaic decoration that becomes architecture. The decoration of the interiors so related to the form that they fuse. In less elaborate interior design this is always the ideal approach to color - used not only as just color alone.

  Van Day Truex

  Color, Design, Example

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• In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those Churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests.

  Pope Francis

  Catholic, Greek, Church

  "In 2012 interview, Pope Francis (then-Cardinal Bergoglio) reveals secret of celibacy". Interview with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, aleteia.org. March 18, 2013.

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• Islam united all heresies persecuted in Byzantine Empire and synthesised them well into a conseffion that later became a symbol of Arab self-affirmation.

  Lev Gumilev

  Self, Islam, Empires

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• In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Profound, Maps

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• Once I spoke about this subject among a group of English intellectuals. One of them was a professor on Roman Law at one of the leading British universities. I asked him,what was the official language of the Byzantine Empire? He said, maybe sometime in the sixth or the seventh century.The Justinian Codex, the rule of law in the Byzantine Empire which was produced by Emperor Justinian, it was written in Latin.And he looked at me ,he knew that I knew already that the only original copy was found in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

  Garry Kasparov

  Latin, Law, Groups

  Source: www.timothytaylor.ca

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• The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.

  William Henry Chamberlin

  Liberty, Population, Libertarian

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• I've had lots of discussions with my Muslim brothers and sisters who have said to me, "Christianity is a white man's religion" But I'm like, "how is that possible when Christianity went into Africa before it ever went into central Europe?" Even the first people to become a Christian nation were not Romans, they weren't the Byzantines either, they weren't the Greeks... the first people to claim a Christian empire were the Armenians.

  Immortal Technique

  Christian, Brother, Men

  Source: www.hiphopcanada.com

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• I don't need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster... carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.

  Steve Jobs

  Needs, Computer, Faster

  Steve Jobs Apple WWDC Keynote, www.onstartups.com. 1997.

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• The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.

  Henry Adams

  Home, Greek, Style

  Henry Adams (2017). “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”, p.116, BookRix

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• You should vote for Neoprene Byzantine in the Hot Hundred, they're really sweet guys and that Moscow song is just wow! Hurry guys voting closes really soon mwah!

  Taylor Swift

  Song, Sweet, Guy

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• To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth.

  Bernard Lewis

  Christian, Scary, Historical

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• My life in Greece influenced what I am. My father was in the left because he was against the king and his family, who had created a war against the Turks at the beginning of the last century to revive the Byzantine Empire. For three years, there was fighting, and all my father's friends died. So he hated the royal family.

  Costa-Gavras

  Kings, Father, War

  Source: progressive.org

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• I'm not into smoke-filled rooms. I don't have the time for byzantine political intrigues.

  Benazir Bhutto

  Political, Rooms, Intrigue

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