Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature."

"Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty."

"Laws are silent in time of war."

"In time of war the laws are silent."

"The sinews of war are infinite money."

"The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend."

"Two distinctive traits especially identify beyond a doubt a strong and dominant character. One trait is contempt for external circumstances, when one is convinced that men ought to respect, to desire, and to pursue only what is moral and right, that men should be subject to nothing, not to another man, not to some disturbing passion, not to Fortune. The second trait, when your character has the disposition I outlined just now, is to perform the kind of services that are significant and most beneficial; but they should also be services that are a severe challenge, that are filled with ordeals, and that endanger not only your life but also the many comforts that make life attractive. Of these two traits, all the glory, magnificence, and the advantage, too, let us not forget, are in the second, while the drive and the discipline that make men great are in the former."

"Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just."

"It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment."

"There are no snares more dangerous than those which lurk under the guise of duty or the name of relationship."

"We are bound by the law, so that we may be free."

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others."

"Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom."

"If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it."

"Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else's traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man's character is, the better it fits him."

"I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading."

"There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric. The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it."

"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn."

"The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter."

"What an ugly beast is the ape, and how like us."