“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.”

— Thomas Cahill

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Solon was a sort of Athenian Franklin D. Roosevelt… He was an aristocratic reformer who understood instinctively that t…" by Thomas Cahill?

Thomas Cahill 58

American scholar and writer 1940

Related quotes

“National-Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected President... Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies. I am only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came, Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed... I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand... he made profits out of the inflation, out of the misery of others, while I, together with many hundreds of thousands more, lay in hospital.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech Declaring War Against the United States http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hitler-s-speech-declaring-war-against-the-united-states (December 11, 1941)
1940s

“Liberal education was aristocratic in the sense that it was the education of those who enjoyed leisure and political power. If it was the right education for those who had leisure and political power, then it is the right education for everybody today.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

“The power he exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelt's was.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

On Mao Zedong, in The Long March (1957), as quoted in "Mao and the Australian Maoists" by Keith Windschuttle, in Quadrant (October 2005) http://www.sydneyline.com/Mao%20and%20Australian%20Maoists.htm
General sources

“The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. It was not granted by monarchs, it was not gained for us by aristocracies; but it sprang from the people, and, with an immortal instinct, it has always worked for the people.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech at the Printing Trade Festival (1845).
1840s

“Power, instrument of the collective force, created in society to serve as mediator between capital and labor, has become inescapably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat. No political reform can resolve this contradiction, since, according to the avowal of politicians themselves, such a reform could only end by giving more energy and expansion to power, and until it had overthrown the hierarchy and dissolved society, power would not be able to attack the prerogatives of monopoly. The problem consists, then, for the working classes, not in capturing, but in defeating both power and monopoly, which would mean to make rise from the bowels of the people, from the depths of labor, a power greater, an action more powerful which would envelop capital and the State and subjugate them.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849)

“Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Themistocles

“He had gained all the power he had dreamed of then—and had not known a moment of peace since.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 5 (p. 288)

“Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: 引爆趨勢 : 小改變如何引發大流行 [Yin bao qu shi: xiao gai bian ru he yin fa da liu xing]

“The task of building the peace lies with the leaders of every nation, large and small. For the great powers have no monopoly on conflict or ambition.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, UN speech
Context: The task of building the peace lies with the leaders of every nation, large and small. For the great powers have no monopoly on conflict or ambition. The cold war is not the only expression of tension in this world — and the nuclear race is not the only arms race. Even little wars are dangerous in a nuclear world. The long labor of peace is an undertaking for every nation — and in this effort none of us can remain unaligned. To this goal none can be uncommitted.

“Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

London: Pluto, 1996.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Powers and Prospects (1996)

“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.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Thomas Cahill 58

Related quotes

Related topics