Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been … - Thomas Cahill

Solon was a sort of Athenian Franklin D. Roosevelt... He was an aristocratic reformer who understood instinctively that the aristocracy's monopoly on power had to be loosened and some power given to the lesser orders if social peace was to be shored up.

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 fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still too childlike and playful to find any value in snobbery.

Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.