Endeløs Tomhed, sagde Prædikeren, endeløs Tomhed, alt er Tomhed Hvad vinding har mennesket af al den flid, han gør sig under solen? Slægt går, og slægt kommer, men jorden står til evig tid. Sol står op, og sol går ned og haster igen til sin opgangs sted. Vinden går mod syd og drejer mod nord, […]
Les mer»«Long before the Greeks, mankind realized that order was necessary for society to function, but it was always believed that order was impossible without autocratic rule. The great empires of the ancient world Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia were all tyrannies. It took the small and unimpressive city state of Athens to produce the idea that individual […]
Les mer»«The revolutionary notion that ordinary man could rule himself took root 2,500 years ago in the late sixth century B.C. after the Athenian lawgiver, Solon, extended power sharing beyond the aristocracy. It crystallized in the last decade of the century with the reforms of the statesman Kleisthenes, reforms that distributed political rights to all free […]
Les mer»«The concept of individual freedom is now so much a part of our spiritual and intellectual heritage that it is hard today to realize exactly how radical an idea it was. No society before the Greeks had thought that equality and freedom of the individual could lead to anything but disaster. – From Nicholas Gage, […]
Les mer»«With this new day came an explosion of the creative spirit in Greece, producing the architecture, the art, the drama, and the philosophy that have shaped Western civilization ever since. Jason’s harvest of armed soldiers, grown in a day from dragon’s teeth, seems no more miraculous. «What was then produced in art and thought has […]
Les mer»During the fifteenth century, in Florence, a small group of laymen cross-bred Christianity wirh the best elements of classical Greece and Rome to produce a new way of life which may be termed Christian humanism. This set high value on political freedom, public-spiritedness and free enquiry, on man’s will and imagination, on the beauty and […]
Les mer»«First, there was the vision. In the fifth century before Christ, an unprecedented idea rose from a small Greek city on the dusty plains of Attica and exploded over the Western Hemisphere like the birth of a new sun. Its light has warmed and illuminated us ever since; sometimes obscured by shadows, then bursting forth […]
Les mer»The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, […]
Les mer»and they will reward you with what they have at hand with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland the defenders of the kingdom without limit and […]
Les mer»repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain repeat great words repeat them stubbornly like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand by Zbigniew Herbert translated by John Carpenter & Bogdana Carpenter
Les mer»
