Edith Hall Quotes
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Nobody brings ancient history and archaeology to life like Adrienne Mayor. From the Russian steppes to China, and from Roman Egypt and Arabia to the Etruscans, she leads the reader on a breathtaking quest for the real ancient warrior women reflected in myths--their daring, archery, tattoos, fine horses, and independence from male control. The book's rich erudition, communicated in sparkling prose and beautiful illustrations, makes it a riveting read.
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The Babylonians had known about Pythagoras’s theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born.
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Aristotle devotes many pages to the relationship between your internal self as a moral agent – your ability to determine your own behaviour and control your destiny.
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The openness of Athens created by the democracy, he had seen, threatened to destabilize the democracy itself.
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An illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half.
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Odysseus is one of antiquity’s few exclusively heterosexual heroes.
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The Open Society of Athens In democratic Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Greek civilization reached the apex of creativity. Perhaps alone among the Greek communities studied in this book, the classical Athenians demonstrated their ample endowment with every one of the ten characteristics that defined the ancient Greek mind-set. They were superb sailors, insatiably curious, and unusually suspicious of individuals with any kind of power. They were deeply competitive, masters of the spoken word, enjoyed laughing so much that they institutionalized comic theater, and were addicted to pleasurable pastimes. Yet the feature of the Athenian character that underlies every aspect of their collective achievement is undoubtedly their openness—to innovation, to adopting ideas from outside, and to self-expression.
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Aristotle was convinced that most people get most of their pleasure from learning things and wondering about and at the world.
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Politicians are scrutinized for what they have done wrong, but rarely for what they have not done to improve the situation of the people they are.
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The second group consists of people of action who spend their lives in the public or political sphere. Their goal is fame or honor—recognition. The problem, however, is that they are keener on being recognized, than on actually being good people. What matters is the accolades and not the reason for.
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The method entails deliberating competently about all alternative courses of action which may or may not conduce to achieving your goals, attempting to anticipate the consequences of each course of action, and then choosing and sticking to one.