Quotes About Circuses

Here in these circuses and carnivals we all love each other with our oddities and queernesses.

I read the Romans had bread and circuses. We had home relief and boxing.

Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.

Circuses don't treat their 'performers' very well - whipping them, trying to make them terrified.

Say no to circuses that exploit and abuse animals.

I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles In children's circuses could stay their troubles? There was a time they could cry over books, But time has set its maggot on their track. Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe. What's never known is safest in this life. Under the skysigns they have no arms Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

Several countries - among them Austria, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, India, Israel and Sweden - ban or severely restrict the use of wild animals in circuses. In Brazil, a movement to ban wild animals from circuses started after hungry lions managed to grab and devour a small boy.

There is no excuse for keeping wild animals in amusement parks or circuses. Until our governments take action, we should avoid supporting places where captive wild animals perform for our amusement. If the public will not pay to see them, the businesses that profit from keeping animals captive will not be able to continue.

Attempts to defend amusement parks and circuses on the grounds that they 'educate' people about animals should not be taken seriously. Such enterprises are part of the commercial entertainment industry. The most important lesson they teach impressionable young minds is that it is acceptable to keep animals in captivity for human amusement.

The word 'midget' is a slur. It evolved from P. T. Barnum's era of circuses and freak shows. Society has evolved. So should our vocabulary. Language is a powerful tool. It does not just name our society. It shapes it.

Bolivia recently did what every country should do - banned the use of animals in circuses.

To be sure, boxing has always been, at best, a shady and sometimes cutthroat business, buttressed by hype and tomfoolery rivalling, at times, that of carnival circuses.

Circuses and carnivals used to be considered the work of the Devil in the 19th century, when shows traveled in wagons and disapproving clergymen had real power.

Two things only the people actually desire bread and circuses.

In most countries, it is possible to visit zoos and see bored animals pacing back and forth in cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next meal. Circuses are even worse places for animals. Their living conditions are deplorable, especially in travelling circuses where cages have to be small so that they can go on the road.

Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country.

We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to corpse eating is a central example of how our language transmits the dominant culture's approval of this activity.

Anyone who speaks Latin (gets egged by the populace for being a nerd) must have wondered from the start if Panem was a reference to the Roman people's reported liking for bread and circuses—for instant gratification that would distract them from the harsher realities of life.

Tied down by so many controls at wages little above the subsistence level, the German workers, like the Roman proletariat, were provided with circuses by their rulers to divert attention from their miserable state. "We had to divert the attention of the masses from material to moral values," Dr. Ley once explained. "It is more important to feed the souls of men than their stomachs.

The Roman people too, in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace. Rather bread and circuses than endless internecine wars. As the Romans themselves recognized, their freedom had contained the seeds of its own ruin, a reflection sufficient to inspire much gloomy moralizing under the rule of a Nero or a Domitian.

And his rage rises to a white heat against certain nobles of Treves who, after the city had been burned and sacked thrice, could still ask the emperors for circuses. "Where would you hold these public spectacles?" he asks, – "Over the graves and ashes, the bones and blood of the dead?" In another passage he gives us briefly the conclusion of the whole matter: "The whole Roman world is in misery and yet is luxurious. . . . It is dying and it laughs.

Juvenal is not the only one to write off the priorities of the Roman people as 'bread and circuses'. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, makes exactly the same point when he writes of the emperor Trajan that 'he understood that the Roman people are kept in line by two things beyond all else: the corn dole and entertainments'.