Ancient Societies Quotes

The ancients knew of no nations that could fuse many discordant elements into one society.

The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.

Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.

The priesthood has in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.

I think the key to the whole appeal of Amazons is the egalitarian society. There was once a time and place where equality was taken for granted - it was logical and necessary - and I think most people can get the message that if it happened once, it could happen again.

The modern conception of 'race' owes its widespread diffusion to the white man. Wherever he has gone, he has carried it with him. ... This is not to say that discrimination against (personal) groups on the basis of skin color or difference did not exist in the ancient world; there is plenty of evidence that it did. But it is to say that such views never became the officially established doctrine, upon any large scale, of any ancient society. ...

Christianity enhanced the notion of political and social accountability by providing a new model: that of servant leadership. In ancient Greece and Rome no one would have dreamed of considering political leaders anyone's servants. The job of the leader was to lead. But Christ invented the notion that the way to lead is by serving the needs of others, especially those who are the most needy.

The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.

If we were living in ancient Rome or Greece, I would be considered sickly and unattractive. The times dictate that thin is better for some strange reason, which I think is foolish.

Individual tribes or, in other words, races or stocks, are the constituent elements of the earliest history.

If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord's word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah's testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah's fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts.

All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.

The creators of Wonder Woman had no interest in proving an actual link to the past. In some parts of the academic world, however, the historical existence of the Amazons, or any matriarchal society, has long been a raging issue.

The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.

People have been looking for love potions since hunter-gatherer societies.

It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

I think that if I have a chance to go back, why not just go back all the way in history to the times of the pyramids or the Roman days? I think there are so many great historic times until now that I would like to get a little peek of those periods, rather than just 1984. Why limit yourself?

As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.

In the most ancient civilizations there is no distinction between the political or social and the religious …. The social festivals were as much religious as they were political. Political and religious functions were necessarily united in the same persons since every religions act was political, every political act also religious

Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.

Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China.

Primitive societies, or social groupings, had shamans, and some of them even more recent in time. Shamans were tricksters. There was a tradition of the trickster, and the trickster was a clown, a humorous fellow. His task was to trick the gods, to humor the gods into laughing, so that there was access to the divine - because laughter is a moment when we are completely ourselves.