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We Greeks are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.

A heroic nature is very Greek.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Quality in a classical Greek sense is how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex.

The nomads' egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, 'the equals of men.'

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.

People try to make a Greek tragedy of my life, and they can't do it. I'm too happy.