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1 " A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and chiseled squint of the veteran. Even his submissions to terror, the very shit with which he paints his thighs under fire is trophy to him; he points it out to his comrades, laughing in the aftercourse of action as if it were a decoration for valour, for it makes him a salt, a veteran, an old hand. "
― Steven Pressfield , Last of the Amazons
2 " The rancor I once bore recedes, supplanted by admiration and a sense even of loss at the mates we might have been and the times we might have shared. "
3 " Indeed, we own a bond, my friend. That most sublime of all: reminiscence for our vanished youth. "
4 " What could be more natural for this man than to draw to his bosom all with whom he shared that time, even his foes? Perhaps his foes more than any. "
5 " Each man recalls not the enemy he hated, but the champion who engaged him with such valor. "
6 " It was an era when history butted up against mythology, "
7 " You imagined we had entered unknown country, my friend, when we voyaged across the sea to Amazonia. Yet that was nothing beside the frontier I cross each evening with this woman who is my equal. Each dawn new continents are sighted; each night one alights on shores where no man’s sole has trod.” He "
8 " Remember, they hate us as no other nation, for we are to them that which they fear beyond all: women unmastered by men. "
9 " Our very existence makes them abominate us, for it calls their own wives and daughters to aspire to freedom. "
10 " Last of terror’s stages, Selene had tutored Europa and me, is busyness. "
11 " He looks upon sky and steppe and sees that which God has created. I look and see God Himself. "
12 " That fearsome emotion that animates the female in all-female groups (called outere in Amazon and gynekophoitos in Greek) "
13 " Who profits from a king’s fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care? "
14 " Theseus overturned this by a single stroke: he moved the sessions outdoors, to the hill of the Pnyx, where the people could attend and observe their betters. What a revolution this affected! Before, "
15 " How else account this usage, that enemies of yore may, by the passage of years alone, become friends? "
16 " are never happier than when learning something new. "
17 " I would rather have an army of deer commanded by a lion than an army of lions commanded by a deer!” Here "
18 " to elevate the race of humankind. To endow each individual with sovereignty over his own heart and to lift the state as a whole to govern itself. "
19 " plunge at once into matters as a Greek would, but offered first prayers for the free people’s well-being. "
20 " When one of tal Kyrte misses steppe and sky, she longs not just for their beauty but also their cruelty. For among the free people the foreawareness of one’s death, and heaven’s indifference to it, is the keenest and most brilliant pleasure, rendering all precious. This is the supreme mystery, the fact of existence itself, before which mortals may only stand in silence. "