Fraternity Greek Quotes

Of a sudden he felt that fraternity life was the only way to exist at college. How could he have doubted? (126)

Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living

Even older and just as rich, the ritual of Kappa Alpha Order thrilled his soul and permeated his mind. By the end of the ceremony he was so awed, so filled with idealism, so saturated with nebulous aspirations, that he gazed with love on all his brothers…He floated down the stairs of the old Administration Building that night new born and shining, warm and secure in the midst of a group that no outside force could penetrate nor unsuspected evil ever tarnish. Porter was a Knight of Kappa Alpha Order (193)

They are the ones who started kindergarten together, their circle remaining small until high school graduation. They fled town in groups of twos and threes to attend a handful of colleges all within driving distance of here. They all joined sororities and fraternities with other groups of twos and threes with similar backgrounds, only to gravitate back to this small Louisiana town, the circle closing once again. Greek letters have been traded out for Junior League memberships and dinner parties and golf on Saturday afternoon, as

Christianity was preached just on the basis of the fascination of this fanaticism, and that is what made it so attractive to the Greek and the Roman slaves. They believed that under the millennial religion there would be no more slavery, that there would be plenty to eat and drink; and, therefore, they flocked round the Christian standard. Those who preached the idea first were of course ignorant fanatics, but very sincere. In modern times this millennial aspiration takes the form of equality--of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This is also fanaticism. True

Although the military may have contributed to hazing in all fraternities, BGF hazing seems to have become the most physically intense variation of the practice. The first of the 241 WGFcases Nuwer reported occurred in 1873 at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York). The first military case was the 1900 case cited involving MacArthur. The first BGF cases do not appear until 1977. Glaringly, between 1977 and 1990, BGFs are cited for the same number of hazing cases as military academies are in a ninety-year span. Furthermore, only 23 percent of the reported military cases involved physical abuse. In contrast, almost 94 percent of the black cases involved physical abuse—with all four deaths caused by physical hazing. Clearly, I do not contend that physical hazing only occurs in BGFs. Nuwer’s study illustrates that this is not the case. Additionally, men who seek to join organizations such as fraternities and the military through violent means probably belong to a particular personality group. Admittedly, membership in this personality group crosses racial and organizational lines. I want to emphasize that men who seek affiliation with hazing fraternities or even high-risk units of the military are not totally coerced, but are largely self-selected. The striking point of departure is that, at least where fraternal orders are concerned, a higher frequency of this type of personality seems to be found among black men than any other group under consideration here. If true, this helps to explain why the prevalence of physical hazing in BGFs is much higher than in WGFs or even the military. Certainly, an important epistemological question must follow such an assertion. If, in fact, more black men are in this personality group, how did they come to be this way? This is an issue of paramount importance that chapter six engages in depth.

In today’s information economy, the Greek world is using collaboration, innovation, and the mitigation of increasing liability issues to enhance the efficiency and evolution of Greek communities.

In 1984, when the legal drinking age was raised to 21, underage students moved their partying from bars to private houses, which changed the Greek experience profoundly. Now fraternities had disproportionate control over the college party scene, they played an even more dominate role on campus. By the early, 1990s, 86 percent of fraternity brothers were binge drinking.

The university's preponderant "Greek system"—I never heard the words without the echo of the expression Dad and the valley men had for being deeply baffled: It's Greek to me —seemed to be meant to bin students into housefuls as alike themselves as could be achieved. It worked wonderfully; there were entire fraternities and sororities where everyone looked like a first cousin of everyone else. And the system's snugness paced itself on from there. Rush Week to Homecoming to winter proms to May Week and with keg parties and mixers betweentimes, residents of Greek Row could count on a college life as preciously tempoed as a cotillion.

The overriding problem with BGFs is not rooted in the fact that they are Greek-letter organizations with unique practices or that their written rituals somehow mandate violent behavior (as is evidenced by the death of Michael Davis in spite of ritualistic alterations). BGFs have historically been concerned with the construction of a particular black American male identity that affirms and continuously reaffirms black manhood. Unfortunately, violent physical struggle has come to be regarded as a key ingredient in building this manhood.

Black collegians created BGFs in an effort to provide the interpersonal, social, educational, and professional support denied to them in many U.S. social and political structures, but they did not autonomously create the process of violent initiation.

The dependence on the physical often occurs because many black men feel (rightfully or wrongfully) that they are not privy to the same opportunities to define themselves as their white counterparts in U.S. society. This perception (and reality) is explored in depth in later chapters. Before reaching these passages, however, I hope the reader will temporarily accept my hypothesis that social and political marginalization helps to promote the black man’s search for alternate arenas in which he can be regarded as a man. One way to define manhood that has emerged, particularly in black intraracial interaction, is to be physically dominant or able to withstand physical abuse. In this manner, physical toughness eventually can be equated with manliness and this phenomenon carries over into BGFs. This reality helps to explain why many individuals continue to submit to hazing—they feel that it affirms their toughness and manhood.

to found a fraternal society of their own. Humbler than its illustrious Vienna equivalent, their Filiki Etaireia (Friendly Society) would turn out to be the catalyst for Europe’s first successful national revolution, ultimately forcing kings and diplomats to change their entire approach to the management of the European peace.11

The war’s military organization was an innocently conceived social society founded by a group, of bored veterans around Christmas 1865. In a law office in Pulaski, Tennessee, the veterans had created a secret fraternity called the Kuklos, after the Greek word for circle. Someone had added clan to reflect the area’s Scotch-Irish heritage, and the whole thing had been transmuted

Englishmen of Whiggish persuasion were convinced that, after decades and centuries of thought and travail, the British constitution had come to represent the best way to achieve that goal. Drawing heavily from Greek and Roman thinkers who had affirmed the need of mixed government in order to achieve balance and harmony among social classes, the English had achieved such a balance of social power among king, lords, and commons that a political balance of power would be counterpoised among these powerful estates. Social equilibrium in short would produce political equilibrium, which in turn would prevent the kind of immoderate government that might interfere in men’s liberties. This elaborate edifice was based on the theory that men, being naturally selfish, irrational, aggressive, greedy, and lustful, had to be not only protected in their liberty from government but protected from one another by government. The “Interest of Freedom,” Marchamont Nedham had written in the mid-1650s, “is a Virgin that everyone seeks to deflower.” Paine and his fellow radicals rejected this view of human nature and the Whiggish apparatus that went with it. Perhaps the people of the Old World, divided into unequal estates and corrupted by their rulers, were prone to depravity and unreason, they granted, but Americans were different. Farmers and mechanics and all others who wore “leathern aprons,” being more equal and fraternal and less grasping and competitive, were more reasonable and virtuous. Because of his faith in human nature and the perfectibility of man, as Eric Foner has said, “Paine could reject the need for governmental checks and balances.

The first night nothing happened at al, except we were hung over and stiff from having slept on the ground. So the next time we didn't drink as much, but there we all were, in the middle of the night on the hill behind Francis's house, drunk and in chitons and singing Greeks hymns like something from a fraternity initiation, and all at once Bunny began to laugh o hard that he fell over like a ninepin and rolled down the hill.

John was your typical west suburban, chest-thumping meatbag, with a body built for date rape and a giant shellacked auburn head that remained defiantly empty, save for a handful of professional baseball statistics and whatever Greek letters you need to learn to pledge the fraternity with the most lenient academic prerequisite. John was the kind of dude who already looked like someone’s dad; you know what I mean? Like, the kind of dude in mirrored shades who chews bubble gum really hard with his arms crossed over his chest, the kind of perpetually tan, leathery-skin motherfucker who always looks like he’s standing on a sideline somewhere. The kind of asshole you are continually surprised to find without a whistle around his neck; a gentleman who should be shouting red-faced into a Bluetooth or standing on a deck he proudly built flipping burgers on a grill he got on sale at Lowe’s.

By 2013, the fraternity lifestyle website Total Frat Move wrote, “Greek life today makes Animal House look like a Pixar movie.

While only 2 percent of America’s population is involved in fraternities, 80 percent of Fortune 500 executives, 76 percent of U.S. senators and congressmen, 85 percent of Supreme Court justices, and all but two presidents since 1825 have been fraternity men.” Less publicized but just as wild is this fact: Greek alumni give approximately 75 percent of all money donated to universities.