Quotes About Cicero

O temporal O mores! O what times! what morals!

Cicero once said of Cato, 'he talks as if he were in the Republic of Plato, when in fact he is in the crap of Romulus'.

Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question 'Cui bono?' (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.

According to Cicero, he held that "friendship cannot be divorced from pleasure, and for that reason must be cultivated, because without it neither can we live in safety and without fear, nor even pleasantly.

Frequently, friendship is represented as something too steadily pleasant, or in certain of the masterpieces of the past -- Aristotle and Cicero, for example -- as pervaded by a constant mutual understanding and a gentle calm. Friendship is also an emotional relationship, with involvement that can get hot at times, like any other deep involvement with a person.

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful; but I never read in either of them, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden."

The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

No one dances while he is sober. Unless he happens to be a lunatic. -Cicero

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

This argument—"We are all of us carried along by a fiery zeal to recover our liberty; our arms cannot be wrested from our hands,"97—was a politico-military ideal but an inaccurate prediction, for both Cicero and the Roman republic, in part due to the inferiority of their arms, were killed within the year by Caesar's standing army.

passage from Cicero's defense of Titus Annius Milo in ancient Rome on murder charges: "When arms speak, the laws are silent; they bid none to await their word .... And yet most wisely, and, in a way, tacitly, the law authorises self-defence .... The man who had employed a weapon in self-defence was not held to have carried that weapon with a view to homicide.

Cum mulieribus non est disputandum, as Cicero says.

Loci. Latin for 'places.' Mnemonic device for managing memory. Simonides, Cicero, Quintilian all

Then Hadrian laughed. "Listen to me! Did you hear that accent? Thicker than Trajan's! When I think of all those hours I spent with my elocution teachers, reading Cicero aloud until I was hoarse. Numa's balls, I haven't sounded so much like a Spaniard since I was a boy. That was so long ago. . . ." He closed his eyes and drifted off.

At length Old Tiro returned, lifting the curtain for his master. How shall I describe Marcus Tullius Cicero? The beautiful all look alike, but a plain man is plain according to his own peculiarity.

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.

I know that it is likely that as worship of the gods declines, faith between men and all human society will disappear, as well as that most excellent of all virtues, which is justice.

Men do not realize how great an income thrift is.

The people, as Cicero says, may be ignorant, but they can recognize the truth and will readily yield when some trustworthy man explains it to them.

I would not have Drool reading Cicero or crafting clever riddles, but under my tutelage he had become more than fair at tumbling and juggling, could belch a song, and was, at court, at least as entertaining as a trained bear, with slightly less proclivity for eating the guests. With guidance, he would make a proper fool.

This is the Hermes who, on the authority of Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods [3.22.56], was called by the Egyptians [Thoth or] Theuth (from which the Greeks are said to have derived theos),

Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

a flutter of wings rippling the fabric of the night. "Balastair!" chirps a voice. At first he thinks it's Cicero, but it's not, not at all—Cicero is still in the air, still chirping and screeching in alarm. "Erasmus," Balastair says with a small smile. "I've missed you.