Browsing Topic Best Ancient Rome Quotes

A bad peace is even worse than war.

War may be the game of kings, but, like the games at ancient Rome, it is generally exhibited to please and pacify the people.

My mother’s father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’ While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I’d be Horatius keeping the bridge.

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse – the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

I write about times and places I would visit in a time machine, like ancient Rome or the Wild West.

No slave system has ever been able to continue to function on the slaves provided by its own biological reproduction because the rate of human reproduction is too slow and the expense from infant mortality and years of unproductive upkeep of the young make this prohibitively expensive. This relationship is one of the basic causes of the American Civil War, and was even more significant in destroying ancient Rome.

It was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals; but the primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity.

Women [in ancient Rome] were condemned to the perpetual tutelage of parents, husbands, or guardians; a sex created to please and obey was never supposed to have attained the age of reason and experience. Such, at least, was the stern and haughty spirit of the ancient law . . .

As the profoundest philosophy of ancient Rome and Greece lighted her taper at Israel’s altar, so the sweetest strains of the pagan muse were swept from harps attuned on Zion’s hill.

But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome – people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.

[In ancient Rome,] why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew? Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It’s the same thing with Germany and Hitler.

I read mostly historical fiction – lots of stuff set in ancient Rome and ancient Greece. I also liked sci-fi and fantasy: David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist. It’s a nice escape from the world. As much as I do love real-life stories, they can often make you hurt in a way I’d rather not hurt.

If we were living in ancient Rome or Greece, I would be considered sickly and unattractive. The times dictate that thin is better for some strange reason, which I think is foolish.

I would be literally patrician in the sense that the senators in ancient Rome were called conscript fathers, paters, from which comes the word patrician. So if you come from a senatorial family, you are literally patrician in that sense, but that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t be Billy Carter, you know, of recent memory.

It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one’s country.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

Internationally, ancient Rome and Greece cultures are just so fascinating. I don’t think audiences will ever tire of it, because it’s such an advanced society.

Fit men walking around and bathing, it would be just like being in Ancient Rome [on a footballers dressing room

Silent enim leges inter arma (Laws are silent in times of war).

It was stone carvers in ancient Rome, scribes in the Middle Ages, all the way through Gutenberg to the present day. That’s a pretty long track record. More likely we may reach a point where each one of us is a typographer with our own custom proprietary typeface.

Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.