Spartan Quotes

1. "There were two views of how a polis was formed. The first was military: a scattered group of people came to live in one city behind a set of protective walls. The other was political: a group of people agreed to live under one authority, with or whithout the protection of a walled city. Synoikismos, or 'Living together', embraces both. Any political entity implies a population that recognizes a common authority, but the first 'city-states' were not always based on a city. Sparta makes the point. We think of Sparta as a city, but the Spartans were proud of the fact that they lived in villages without protective walls: their army was their wall and 'every man a brick."
Author: Alan Ryan

2. "The revolt in Asia Minor was snugged out in 494, and the Athenians realized that they had acquired a dangerous enemy. Darius I's first attempt at invasion in 492 was abortive: a huge storm wrecked his fleet. In 491 the Persians demanded 'earth and water' --signs of submission--from the Aegean islands and mainland cities. Many submitted. Athens and Sparta not only stood firm but murdered the Persian ambassadors. The Athenians put them on trial and killed both the ambassadors and their translator for offenses against the Greek language; the Spartans simply thew them down a well."
Author: Alan Ryan

3. "Google is famous for making the tiniest changes to pixel locations based on the data it accrues through its tests. Google will always choose a spartan webpage that converts over a beautiful page that doesn't have the data to back it up."
Author: Ben Parr

4. "It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own."
Author: Bill Bryson

5. "At the age of about eight years, if he is a boy, she turns him over to his father for more Spartan training."
Author: Charles Eastman

6. "Back in Nina's large Spartan bedroom, the three of them plunked their sore, beat-up frames into the same seats they'd chosen before the madness."
Author: Christa Faust

7. "The wives of Spartans are the secret pillars of the world."--Odd Thomas"
Author: Dean Koontz

8. "The house was dark. Upstairs, behind the black open window with the pale curtain flapping in the spartan air, slept Arthur Morrison, trainer of the forty-three racehorses in the stables below. Morrison habitually slept lightly. His ears were sharper than half a dozen guard dogs', his stable-hands said."
Author: Dick Francis

9. "It is the custom to look back on ourselves of the boom days with a disapproval that approaches horror...But it had its virtues, that old boom: Life was a great deal larger and gayer for most people, and the stampede to the Spartan virtues in times of war and famine shouldn't make us too dizzy to remember its hilarious glory."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

10. "A writer should remember that about his muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father - if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out."
Author: F.L. Lucas

11. "Spartans... tonight we dine in Hell!"
Author: Frank Miller

12. "In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don't need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days' time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page."
Author: Hilary Mantel

13. "MacMurrough shifted his gaze from the thick spittle-wet mouth and stared instead through the garden windows. What a dreary drunk he was. He recalled the Spartan custom of inebriating slaves that young men should see how contemptible was drunkenness. Nowadays we leave it to our leshishlashors."
Author: Jamie O'Neill

14. "When the clock reads 3:00, I don't call it three o'clock, I call it three hundred, and I remember the Spartans. At 3:01, however, I remember what I was doing at 2:59, and I get back to it."
Author: Jarod Kintz

15. "Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine."
Author: Jean Jacques Rousseau

16. "I'll give you this, Spartan. You sure can kiss. Feel free to lay one on me anytime you want to.""Well, I do aim to please," he drawled. "You should see what I can do with my hands. And other parts of my body."I rolled my eyes. "Seriously? You've been cut open like a fish, there's a psycho-killer Reaper after us, and you're still hitting me up for sex?"Logan shrugged, but the devilish light didn't fade from his gaze. "Hey, you can't blame a guy for trying."
Author: Jennifer Estep

17. "Just another part of that Spartan killer instinct. I can slay the ladies just as well as I can reapers."
Author: Jennifer Estep

18. "What did you expect? That he'd send you flowers and write you bad poetry? That dead Nemean prowler is pretty much as close to a stuffed animal as you're ever going to get from a Spartan like Logan Quinn."
Author: Jennifer Estep

19. "Yeah, well this Gypsy girl happens to have a grandma that can curse you so bad that your dick will turn black and fall off, so watch your step, Spartan."
Author: Jennifer Estep

20. "Let me walk you to your room," Logan offered in a helpful voice. "You, me, and the Gypsy girl could have our own bonfire tonight." Daphne and I stared at each other. I rolled my eyes while Daphne sniffed."Oh, please," she scoffed. "Like I need a guy to protect me. I'm a Valkyrie, remember? I could pick you up and break your back over my knee, Spartan. Like you were a piñata.""Kinky," Logan said, smiling at her. "I like it."She snorted. "Save the smarmy charm for Gwen. We all know that she's the one you're really trying to impress anyway." We did? Because I hadn't gotten that message at all."
Author: Jennifer Estep

21. "I'm crazy about you, Spartan."
Author: Jennifer Estep

22. "Yes, Hart, I went commando to a diplomatic function," Harry said, and then motioned to his body. "And now, as you can see, I'm going Spartan so a midget can whack me with a stick." He bent and picked up his Bongka. "Honestly, Hart. Help me out here. Focus a little."
Author: John Scalzi

23. "We don't do psyop. We've never worked with Spartans before. And we're definitely not trained for this spook stuff. But how hard can it be? They were ODSTs. They could do anything. It was all about the right attitude—a commando's state of mind. "Hi, BB," Mal said. "Take us to Hinge-head World, then."
Author: Karen Traviss

24. "Admiral Spartan thinks that the object must be exposed and penetrated with all possible speed."
Author: Lincoln Child

25. "When asked by a woman from Attica:'Why are you Spartan women the only ones who can rule men?', she said: 'Because we are the only ones who give birth to men."
Author: Plutarch

26. "What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

27. "Write to me your most perfect epitaph, or I shall compare a poet to a lecturer. Thou art more Spartan than a ballad monger who makes his living as a Wal-Mart greeter;"
Author: Scott Jonathan Nixon

28. "First of all, you don't want me to get too hungry. Ever. I'm an ever worse bastard than normal and having starved for centuries, I'm not about to deprive myself again when I don't have to. Second, let me tell you something about your ‘friends.' Deimos held me down while I was branded and then took me to the human realm where I was left with nothing. No clothes, no money. Not a damn thing to call my own. Hence the aforementioned starvation. A hundred years later, M'Ordant dumped my inside a Spartan prison camp and told the commander I was a traitor to their people. You don't really want to know what the Spartans did to people they thought betrayed them. D'Alerian had me put inside a Turkish prison in the fifteenth century where I was impaled after being tortured for three weeks. So you'll have to excuse me if I have a hard time feeling too sorry for them right now. At least no one's shoving a sharp spike up their asses. (Jericho)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

29. "O Stranger, send the news home to the people of Sparta that here weAre laid to rest: the commands they gave us have been obeyed.? ?e??', ??????e?? ?a?eda?µ?????? ?t? t?de?e?µe?a, t??? ?e???? ??µas? pe???µe???.[Epitaph of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae]"
Author: Simonides

30. "Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie."
Author: Simonides

31. "The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone."
Author: Steven Pressfield

32. "I wil not compare the education of an ancient Spartan with that of a British nobleman."
Author: Thomas Day

33. "My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Spartan Quotes Pictures