H.D.F. Kitto
Humphrey Davy Findley Kitto, FBA was a British classical scholar of Cornish ancestry.
He was educated at The Crypt School, Gloucester, and St. John's College, Cambridge. He wrote his doctorate in 1920 at the University of Bristol. He became a lecturer in Greek at the University of Glasgow from 1920 to 1944. On that year, he returned to the University of Bristol where he became Professor of Greek and emeritus in 1962. He concentrated on studies of Greek tragedy, especially translations of the works of Sophocles.
After his retirement, he taught at College Year in Athens (CYA), a study abroad program for foreign students in Athens, Greece.
“Typical of the limitations, even the contradictions of life, is the fact that what is most worth having can often only be had at the peril of life itself.”
H.D.F. Kitto
“It is an interesting, though idle, speculation, what would be the effect on us if all our reformers, revolutionaries, planners, politicians, and life-arrangers in general were soaked in Homer from their youth up, like the Greeks. They might realize that on the happy day when there is a refrigerator in every home, and two in none, when we all have the opportunity of working for the common good (whatever that is), when Common Man (whoever he is) is triumphant, though not improved--that men will still come and go like the generations of leaves in the forest; that he will still be weak, and the gods strong and incalculable; that the quality of a man matters more than his achievement; that violence and recklessness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty.”
H.D.F. Kitto
“...unless our standards of civilization are comfort and contraptions, Athens from (say) 480 to 380 was clearly the most civilized society that has yet existed.”
H.D.F. Kitto
“The city-state was the means by which the Greek consciously strove to make the life both of the community and of the individual more excellent than it was before.”
H.D.F. Kitto