At Athens, wise men propose, and fools dispose.
Alcuin
How great are the dangers I face to win a good name in Athens.
Alexander the Great
As for Aliki - if you were to stand in the middle of Rome and say the name Sophia Loren, or Paris and say the name Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Bardot, or L.A. and the name Marilyn Monroe, it's like standing in Athens, or anywhere in wide-flung Greece, and saying Aliki Vougiouklaki. A huge star - and so little known elsewhere in the world.
Ali Smith
I always look back to my first Olympic medal in 2004 in Athens. I was very new to the sport, and it was my first big win at the Olympics.
Allyson Felix
The thing that helped me get into the film business was that I went to school in Athens, Georgia and managed to get on, um, working on music videos for a band called R.E.M. and that kind of opened up a lot of doors for me.
Alton Brown
A horseman's head is in Athens, and his body is in London: Poseidon's torso is separated between Greece and the U.K. This means that they cannot be celebrated and appreciated as a whole in the country they came from.
Amal Clooney
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.
Amit Bhatia
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.
Benjamin Disraeli
The Olympic Games of the Modern Era began in 1896 in the city of Athens.
Bill Toomey
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.
When I won gold in Athens, I said to my wife Cath, who was pregnant, 'This baby of ours will never want for anything.' There was real pride in that - but it just didn't happen.
Bradley Wiggins
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.
Brendan Myers
There's not a whole lot to do in Athens. When I was 13, I just started entertaining myself by writing songs. I'd sit in my room for 10 hours playing the same song, stacking vocals, trying out different drum beats, realizing no one would ever hear this but having so much fun. I guess I got my voice from just doing that so often.
Brittany Howard
We're from Athens, Alabama. That's my town. People think it's Muscle Shoals, but they have no idea. It's a quiet, sleepy little town, about 45 minutes from Muscle Shoals. It's really hard to be a band in Athens; there are no venues.
I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.
Christine Lagarde
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.
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.
Chrysippus
Athens is an amazing city for creativity. I bought a house there. A little, tiny place.
Cindy Wilson
Athens is one of those cities that is very livable. And it's inexpensive. You can get by. And that makes for creativity. So people tend to stay there. I still have some friends there that never left.
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.
David Brainerd
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.
In Elizabethan England or classical Athens... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.
We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
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.
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.
Certainly, R.E.M. grew out of the Wuxtry record store in Athens, where Peter Buck was working and Michael Stipe came in to visit. And even their later manager, Bertis Downs, they all met and congregated at that record store. So I'm sure we wouldn't see those without the record store.
I was fortunate to be born when I was. There's been a massive rise in British cycling since I joined the junior programme when I was 17. It all started in 2004 when Chris Hoy won gold for the 1 km. time trial in Athens; when one person starts doing well, they take everyone with them.
I like living in a smaller place, but I like being in big cities, too, like Athens.
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.
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.
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.
The critical thing about Western democracy is the fact that you usually have a transition of power without bloodshed. That is an enormous advantage. But still, democracy as we know it was only invented recently in the West, historical speaking. It did not really work in ancient Rome. It functioned for less than 200 years in ancient Athens.
Greece has got something like 1,400 islands. There is so much of Greece you can't know even if you're Greek. It's sprinkled out all around the edge of the Aegean, all over the place. It's already a secret place wherever you go, even if it's somewhere huge like Athens or Corinth. The place enchanted me.
The thing about working in Hollywood is that, at some point, you really get tired of hearing how godless you are, and how if you and the rest of the heathens in Tinsel town would put more God-centric shows on TV, people wouldn't be abandoning prime time in favor of their Bible study classes.
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.
When explorers first encountered my people, they called us heathens, sun worshippers. They didn't understand that the sun is a relative and illuminates our path on this earth.
Heathens are unredeemed outcasts from heaven who roam the planet without hope of surviving the deaths of their bodies. They may have values, but they are not secured by any divine source. Yet we embrace this because we think it represents the truth.
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.
I love Atlanta. I feel really at home in Atlanta. We spent a lot of time there. But Athens is like home to me.
I had really long hair, and we had this hairdresser, Laverne, that was in Athens. And she did my hair up really big. And she said, 'Honey, when you hang your head over the bed and make love, that hair is not going to move.'
We all maintained our connections and our friendships, which we've maintained over all these years. We still like each other, love each other, and we realize that this was a way to heal and a way to really bring Ricky back into the mix. I think a lot of the songs recalled that time in Athens with Ricky.
Until 2005, I still thought of my surf lifesaving career as fulltime and kayaking as a pastime. I watched the 2004 Athens Olympics and saw people racing that I knew I could beat, and that was probably the turning point: I decided I should either do it properly or stop wasting time kayaking and concentrate fully on Ironman.
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.
In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity.
People aren't familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew.
I watched my idol and fellow Dutchman Tiesto. He was the first DJ to play live on stage at an Olympic event - the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. At eight years old, all I can remember thinking was, 'I want to be a DJ.'
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.
Athens is a great place for me. It is my second home. It's where I won my first world championship medal, it's where I set my world record.
When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.
