Ancient Society Quotes

There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the white ant.

In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.

In Gaul were two orders, the nobility and the priesthood, while the people, says Caesar, were all slaves.

We have ground for believing that a noble form of socialism existed among the prehistoric and primitive people on this planet, the people that broke into restless groups after the ancient Deluge and went wandering over the globe. For we find a socialist tendency in all the barbaric tribes of earth.

The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them.

The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery.

In the ancient world and, above all, among the Greeks, human nature was held in high esteem.

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

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.

It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.

[On the ancient Venus figurines:] If the central religious figure was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life - rather than death and the fear of death - were dominant in society as well as art.

If they liked you, they didn't applaud -- they let you live.

I think it is funny that we were freer about sexuality in the 4th century B.C. It is a little disconcerting.

The everyday issues that we witness against women in the present day will throw light on the respect women enjoyed at the time of Ramayan.

The territorial state is such an ancient form of society - here in Europe it dates back thousands of years - that it is now protected by the sanctity of age and the glory of tradition. A strong religious feeling mingles with the respect and the devotion to the fatherland.

It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.

Ancient simplicity is gone...the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery.

Contempt for private wrongs was one of the features of ancient morals.

The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising.

The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.

The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.

In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.