Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish thought that all language was game—and too much fu… - Thomas Cahill

Pericles' words are echoed in other critical speeches of later Western history... Lincoln at Gettysburg... Churchill's... repeated promise to the British people... of "blood, toil, tears, and sweat." And no wonder, for both orator's knew their Thucydides and knew this speech [Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War]. ...the most obvious later parallel is the 1961 presidential address of John F. Kennedy. ...When he told of the sacrifices yet to come, like Pericles he pulled no punches. ...In neither case is there a confession of atheism, just an implied acknowledgement that a politician is no oracle and has no business speaking on behalf of heaven.

Even the special appurtenances of Christian monasticism—silence, meditation, chanting, distinctive costumes, beads, incense, kneeling, hands raised in prayer—all too likely go back to the Pythagoreans and beyond them to their influences, the Indian Buddhists and their predecessors.

The philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is called Logos (Word, Reason, Meaning)—the word John's Gospel uses to describe Jesus.