Michael Grant > Quotes

“Life is my nightmare now, and paradoxically, my dreams have become escapes.”
― Michael Grant, The Tattooed Heart

“Hope is the best form of torture”
― Michael Grant, Monster - tome 1

“The balance of this world is not upset by accident. It is not upset by those who blunder accidentally into wrong. Evil comes when those who know better, who have seen the pain they cause, nevertheless cause more pain.”
― Michael Grant

“It’s not the monsters who are so completely different that are scary, Sanjit reflected. It’s the ones who are too human. They carry with them the warning that what happened to them might happen to you, too.”
― Michael Grant, Gladiators

“...if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.”
― Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels

“Superpowers,” he said to himself, “don’t always make you a superhero.”
― Michael Grant

“The Classical civilisation, which Greece originated, is the only civilisation which is spread out before us, from beginning to end.”
― Michael Grant, Greeks

“The Romans are difficult to assess today. They employed force, yet what they accomplished by use of it has never been equaled. For Rome conferred, indeed imposed, upon the Mediterranean area and upon vast hinterlands on three continents, a unity that these regions had never known before. And will they ever regain it? So far they have not"
- Foreword to History of Rome (1978).”
― Michael Grant, History of Rome

“Why do people do evil things?
Messenger's answer stunned me, "Why did you?”
― Michael Grant

“I'd noticed it because it was so weirdly out of place, a defiant crimson McIntosh in an army of dull green Granny Smiths.”
― Michael Grant

“We take the names of madmen, because madness is our fate. Terribly melodramatic, that.”
― Michael Grant

“Did she herself even believe in God anymore? Why argue over a phantom? They were two fools arguing over lies.”
― Michael Grant

“The future of Judaism depended upon many other centres of the Jewish Dispersion even more than upon Rome. But archaeological evidence for all these centres remains sparse. There were catacombs at Venusia (Venosa) in south Italy. The Jewish necropolis”
― Michael Grant, Jews In The Roman World

“It is in your interest', said the dancer Pylades to Augustus, 'that the people should devote their spare time to us entertainers - if they do so, they will not bother about subversive politics.”
― Michael Grant

“One thing that is clear is that we do not always want to relive the experience of the Romans; although sometimes what they did is entirely to be admired and envied, in other respects they were detestable. Most of what they achieved was based upon the use of force. The culture that has given us their unequaled masterpieces was created and maintained, in the last resort, by violent means that modern societies could not, or should not, tolerate today…”
― Michael Grant, History of Rome