Quotes About Cato

Brutal, bloody Cato who can snap a neck with a twist of his arm,

Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury.

But the greatest of these marks of respect was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as republicans, in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.

If the victor had the gods on his side, the vanquished had Cato.

Death is terrible to Cicero desirable to Cato and indifferent to Socrates.

It is hard for them to condemn the gerontocratic ideal advocated by Cicero and Cato because that denouncement itself, coming from them, could easily pass, in the guise of preserved or rediscovered youth, as a claim to authority, as a coy claim to wisdom, experience, and power, at the very least the power of influence.

The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the vanquished pleased Cato.

According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen.

Cato, once it was clear that Caesar was the inevitable victor, killed himself at the town of Utica on the coast of what is now Tunisia in the most gory way imaginable. According to his biographer, writing 150 years later, he stabbed himself with his sword but survived the gash. Despite attempts by friends and family to save him, he pushed away the doctor they had summoned and pulled out his own bowels through the still open wound.