Quotes About Cincinnatus

Cincinnati attracted its first permanent white settlers by flatboat in 1788. It took its name from the Society of Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary officers. That name came from Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer and general.

This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to Cincinnatus' silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates.

Fragments of these speeches, in which the words 'translucence' and 'opacity' rose and burst like bubbles, now sounded in Cincinnatus's ears, and the rush of blood became applause

In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for president via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, for example, who more than two millennia later gave his name to the American city of Cincinnati, is supposed to have returned from semi-exile in the 450s BCE to become dictator and lead Roman armies to victory against their enemies before nobly retiring straight back to his farm without seeking further political glory.

There is a lure in power. It can get into a man's blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do. This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus, its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. then we start down the road. to ruin."501

the founding fathers wholeheartedly believed "life was a school for virtue, and one must find the proper teachers."366 As a teacher, someone of Cincinnatus's virtue was "emulated, and spread," as Hume said, by "contagion."367