I prefer a positive view of freedom, drawing on another tradition of political thinking that goes all the way back to the ancient Greek polis.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them, but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.
Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.
And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.
I had to marry a Greek; I had to stir up the ethnic pot. Otherwise, my children would have been anemic and sickly. Now they've got some good Mediterranean blood in them.
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
We talked about politics constantly in my family growing up in North Carolina. There were always debates. Being of Greek background, it's in our blood to drink coffee and talk politics.
I don't buy into any of that hogwash. They put that out to sell tickets. It's just a classic horror movie, with the Greek drama formula of good versus evil, and lots of fear.
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
My goats are not contemplative, accepting, or introspective. They are the Greek chorus of my farm, sometimes of my life. They watch me closely and remind me that I am foolish.
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
I guess darkness serves a purpose: to show us that there is redemption through chaos. I believe in that. I think that's the basis of Greek mythology.
All I had, originally, were pages of Nolan's dialogue. I think his character serves the story in a nice way. He's a Greek chorus for the goings-on in the Hamptons.
The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.
Despite the deep reforms we are making, traders and speculators have forced interest rates on Greek bonds to record highs.
No matter how thoroughly a person may have learned the Greek alphabet, he will never be in a condition to repeat it backwards without further training.
Marcus Brody: Is there anyone here who speaks English? Or maybe even ancient Greek?
Nick the Greek: Is that you, Dean? Dean: No, it's Lord fucking Lucan. Who do you think it is?
