Authors From The United States

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it."

"The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor."

"I like business because it is competitive. Business keeps books. The books are the score cards. Profit is the measure of accomplishment, not the ideal measure, but the most practical that can be devised. I like business because it compels earnestness. Amateurs and dilettantes are shoved out. Once in you must fight for survival or be carried to the sidelines. I like business because it requires courage. Cowards do not get to first base. I like business because It demands faith. Faith in human nature, faith in one's self, faith in one's customers, faith in one's employees. I like business because it is the essence of life. Dreams are good, poetical fancies are good, but bread must be baked today, trains must move today, bills must be collected today, payrolls met today. Business feeds, clothes and houses man. I like business because it rewards deeds and not words. I like business because it does not neglect today's task while it is thinking about tomorrow. I like business because it undertakes to please, not to reform. I like business because it is orderly. I like business because it is bold in enterprise. I like business because it is honestly selfish, thereby avoiding the hypocrisy and sentimentality of the unselfish attitude. I like business because it is promptly penalized for its mistakes, shiftlessness and inefficiency. I like business because its philosophy works. I like business because each day is a fresh, adventure."

"Beware of the man who won't be bothered with details."

"Anyone who can think clearly can write clearly. But neither is easy."

"The way to get things done is to have a good assistant."

"Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic."

"In another of history's terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the plastic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks."

"Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back."

"For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian."

"The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God... by imitating God's justice and mercy."

"As... Greek philosophy split into scores of yip-yapping schools, the Greeks became more and more puzzled. They had lost their way philosophically—and the Romans, who were just aping them, had nothing original to propose by way of saving them all from their dilemmas."

"Even the special appurtenances of Christian monasticism—silence, meditation, chanting, distinctive costumes, beads, incense, kneeling, hands raised in prayer—all too likely go back to the Pythagoreans and beyond them to their influences, the Indian Buddhists and their predecessors."

"The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms. Christ, Ekklēsia (Church), Baptism, Eucharist, Agapē (Lovingkindness)—all of Christianity's central words were Greek words. Christian patterns of thought... could indeed be traced to their origins in the coastal Levant, but they often shone with a Greek patina."

"The philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is called Logos (Word, Reason, Meaning)—the word John's Gospel uses to describe Jesus."

"The idea of physical resurrection struck them [the Greeks] as ghoulish. ...Matter is the very principle of unintelligibity [or lack of intelligence]. Best to be done with it. For the Jews, who had little of no belief in the immortality of the soul, only salvation in one's body could have any meaning."

"Pericles' words are echoed in other critical speeches of later Western history... Lincoln at Gettysburg... Churchill's... repeated promise to the British people... of "blood, toil, tears, and sweat." And no wonder, for both orator's knew their Thucydides and knew this speech [Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War]. ...the most obvious later parallel is the 1961 presidential address of John F. Kennedy. ...When he told of the sacrifices yet to come, like Pericles he pulled no punches. ...In neither case is there a confession of atheism, just an implied acknowledgement that a politician is no oracle and has no business speaking on behalf of heaven."

"No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could. ...the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic."

"When Donald Rumsfeld, a practical imperialist if ever there was one, took over the Pentagon, he commissioned a study of how ancient empires maintained their hegemony. Might he more profitably study how they lost all they had gained?"

"They [the Greeks] had become an essentially secular people."

"If we could save one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi (the best). It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi (the worst, the craven, the dumb shits). though this put-down prances everywhere in the surviving literature. ...that shame—the paralyzing fear of being numbered among the kakoi—is the hidden engine that ran Greek life."

"The [Greek] myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable."

"Of the many people's of the earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all. ...basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations."

"We can understand Greek religion because, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity."

"This paucity of actors on the stage reflects the liturgical roots of Greek theater, which continued to stick close to its religious origins. … [A] machine, called the mēchanē, was a sort of crane that swung an actor playing a god over the parapet of the skēnē and out above the stage (thus the Latin phrase deus ex machina for a solution from nowhere, an unforeseen answer to prayers)."

"...the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout the play [Oedipus Tyrannos] must have been received with sharp pain... because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society—in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that "the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.""

"It is... ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream."

"This hamartia (tragic flaw, the same word that early Christians will use for "sin," especially for original sin, the sin we are born with, the sin beyond any human being's control) is not incidental to Oedipus but is, rather, essential to his admirable character. He is strong, courageous, self-possessed, taking charge and striding boldly where others fear to go—the very qualities that foretell his undoing."

"Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects if the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with "potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter... poet against poet.""

"To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song."

"Unfortunately, much of the post-Homeric poetry—called lyric poetry because it was usually sung to a lyre—was lost in the upheavals of subsequent centuries, especially in the depredations and decay that would follow the barbarian incursions into the Greco-Roman world in the fifth century A.D."

"Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B.C. ...There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests."

"For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life."

"Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind."

"These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—"the father of all, the king of all," "always existing by nature," as the Greek philosophers expressed it."

"The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B.C. ...the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history."

"More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine."

"If we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints."

"Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces."

"For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been... no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there been any between Rome and Ireland..."

"Solon was a sort of Athenian Franklin D. Roosevelt... He was an aristocratic reformer who understood instinctively that the aristocracy's monopoly on power had to be loosened and some power given to the lesser orders if social peace was to be shored up."

"More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen."

"Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan."

"Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out before us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality..."

"The Irish... developed a form of confession that was exclusively private and that had no equivalent on the continent. In the ancient church, confession of one's sins—and the subsequent penance... had always been public. ...one did not necessarily choose one's "priest" from among ordained professionals: the act of confession was too personal and too important for such a limitation. One looked for an anmchara, a soul-friend, someone to be trusted over a whole lifetime."

"A century after the death of Patrick... there were few Romans left in western Europe. [By the mid sixth century] the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam."

"Never interested in impressive edifices, Irish monks preferred to spend their time in study, prayer, farming—and, of course, copying. ...a little hut for each monk... a refectory and kitchen; a scriptorium and library; a smithy, a kiln, a mill, and a couple of barns; a modest church—and they were in business."

"The high abbesses... had the power to heal, ...almost certainly heard confessions, probably ordained clergy, and may even have celebrated Mass."

"Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish thought that all language was game—and too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still too childlike and playful to find any value in snobbery."

"The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available—and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts."