Top 44 Athens Quotes

I am not driven by any bitterness by what happened in Athens. I learnt a lot of lessons from it and probably came through it a stronger person in the end. There have been a lot of near misses, and that’s taught me to keep persevering and that there is a chance it can come right.

If my training goes well and according to plan I feel that I am capable of a top 8 finish in Athens. It will be a very difficult and technical course which will be to my advantage.

I knew very little or nothing about the Olympics. Having qualified was itself a big achievement for me, and then being there was quite overwhelming. Although I lost in the opening round, but the fact that I fought well was enough for me to take away from Athens.

I think one of the greatest gigs I played, and we’ve had many, but to play the opening ceremony at – at the Olympic games in Athens 2004 was pretty special, you know? Because it’s such a big deal for the whole world. And the whole world’s watching. So that was definitely one of the special ones.

My sisters and I were fortunate to travel through Asia and Europe at very young ages. We confronted extraordinary beauty in Athens and unspeakable poverty in India.

I was born in Karachi, where my father used to work in the sales department of a pharmaceutical company. The nature of his job required him to travel, so we moved to Athens, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh and then went to Manchester during the Gulf War, moving back to Lahore closer to my father’s retirement.

After watching the Athens Paralympics in 2004, I looked at the swimmers and thought, that’s cool. I want to do that.

The anchovy which is found in the sea at Athens, men despise on account of its abundance and say that it is a poor man’s fish; but in other cities, they prize it above everything, even where it is far inferior to the Attic anchovy.

The only thing I could do was play music, because I’d studied classical guitar, trumpet and piano at the American School in Alexandria. So I started out with two other boys in little clubs in Athens. I became a singer by default when our lead vocalist was late one night. Someone had to sing.

I understood it was a poor area when I was young because you’re driving through it and you see these low-income homes that I hadn’t really seen before. I’d lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods before we moved to Athens and The Plains. You understand, but you don’t really understand the magnitude until you get older.

My worst holiday was in Athens when I was a young drama student at Rada in 1965. I ran out of money. I had my things stolen and I wasn’t able to speak a word of the language.

I was a halfback on an American football team in Athens, Greece – the Kississia Colts – where I went to high school, and we took the Cup my senior year. The downside, and somewhat unfortunate piece of information I have to pass on, is there were only two teams in the league because of the limited amount of Americans.

It was appointed by law in Athens, that the obsequies of the citizens who fell in battle should be performed at the public expense, and in the most honorable manner.

Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Cicero, just to name a few, all lived in pagan societies. Some of the greatest political and military leaders of all time, such as Alexander the Great, Pericles of Athens, Hannibal of Carthage, and Julius Caesar of Rome, were all pagans, or else living in a pagan society.

I am afraid that, like Timon of Athens, I just cannot let go of my friendships.

As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax.

Athens will again be the host of the Games in 2004, but there are rumors that they might be switched if the Greeks don’t begin to construct the sites faster.

I took a lot of bad things after Athens. I just learnt to deal with it. The problem was beforehand I had this feeling where I was trying to please everybody – I wanted everybody to like me.

At Athens, wise men propose, and fools dispose.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

People aren’t familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew.

The Olympic Games of the Modern Era began in 1896 in the city of Athens.

My father-in-law and I always had great interest in Indian sport. At the Athens Olympics, watching the wrestling event, we started discussing the state of Indian sport – inadequate representation, lack of satisfactory results etc. We thought we should do something about it.

In Athens I was 17 and I didn’t have any expectations. I was just swimming fast and racing everybody. I didn’t have the joy after my races in 2007. I didn’t want to go to Beijing. I had to for sponsors.

I came from the Sticks, literally. I grew up in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, just outside Athens, Georgia.

A few of the sublimest geniuses of Rome and Athens had some faint discoveries of the spiritual nature of the human soul, and formed some probable conjectures, that man was designed for a future state of existence.

I don’t want the United States to be Athens on the Potomac.

One of the flashpoints of the grand war between Athens and Sparta, a millennium after Helen first caused trouble for the Mediterranean world, was nearby Thassos. Thassos – Greece’s northernmost island, is pine-rich, honey-sweet, gold-bearing and picture-postcard perfect.

Greece isn’t a democracy now it’s run through a troika – three foreign officials that fly into Athens airport and tell the Greeks what they can and can’t do.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century.

Every time I go to Athens, it’s not just a trip down memory lane; there’s some surprise. I always meet somebody new, or some crazy party happens, or there’s some amazing event.

We’re from Athens, GA.; we’re big Bulldog fans, and I remember watching A. J. Green, David Pollock, David Greene. We were big Cowboys and Falcons fans.

If the ‘Athens Spring’ – when the Greek people courageously rejected the catastrophic austerity conditions of the previous bailouts – has one lesson to teach, it is that Greece will recover only when the European Union makes the transition from ‘We the states’ to ‘We the European people.’

Puppet Papademos is in place, and as Athens caught fire on Sunday night he rather took my breath away – he said violence and destruction have no place in a democratic country.

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

Being in America isn’t old-hat – it’s where we’re from – but I get excited to be in other parts of the world like Athens and Croatia, which were quite cool. I’m a sightseer. I go see the sights and museums. I’m into that kind of thing.

So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we’re kind of an international phenomenon.

It has been a fantastic journey. I have gone to five Games, broke the Olympics record in 2004 in Athens and won a gold medal as well in Beijing. I have had a good run at the Olympics.

My parents are from the South – they were both born in Birmingham – so my dad saw R.E.M. really early on when they were playing college stuff in Athens. He had a bunch of their cassettes from the ’80s, and when I was 8, 9, or 10, those were the sort of things that were around the cassette player in the living room.

What is the most important moment in my career? The Champions League final played in Athens in 2007 when I netted a double.

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

We have been concentrating on the banks, business and our bellies. We have neglected the spiritual and cultural. It was because Rome and Athens neglected these things that they fell.

Like in Athens, it went by so fast and I mean, I remember it being like the best trip ever. And I am so excited for Beijing. Like at Opening Ceremonies when you walk out with your whole team and you are all marching and they light the torch, I mean – it is so exciting.