Thucydides Quotes

War is human. People fight for the same reasons that the Greek Historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interest.

What Thucydides said of the Greeks at the time of the Peleponnesian War applies to us at present [1860]. The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language; words received a different meaning in different parts.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.

One copy of The [London] Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.

There's a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.

I believe it has been said that one copy of The Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.

The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.

Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it just didn't exist for many classicists and ancient historians.

In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.

The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, in time a Vergil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru.