Quote

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

People who have got to know Western educational methods always claim that the reading of the Classics was a useless waste of time and should be abolished. Such chatter is to be heard from hundreds of people and cannot be stopped. But it is a serious mistake.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

When I was teaching Latin in girls' schools before I became a writer, I didn't much like it if parents would come in and say, 'We'll have less of the Ovid and Virgil and more of the grammar, please.' After all, I was the one in charge. That's how I feel about doctors. You should trust them to do their job properly.

There hasn't been a day in my life since I started Latin in ninth grade that I haven't benefited by the lives of the ancients.

The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.