Browsing Topic Best Nero Quotes

The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes a Titus or Marc Aurelius; the people is often Nero, but never Marc Aurelius.

If, as you believe there is an Almighty, Omnipresent, Omniscient God, who created the earth or universe, please let me know, first of all, as to why he created this world. This world which is full of woe and grief, and countless miseries, where not even one person lives in peace….Where is God? What is He doing? Is He getting a diseased pleasure out of it? A Nero! A Genghis Khan! Down with Him!

After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.

There live Christ and Nero in our hearts.

The ghost of the heart of manred CainAnd the more murderous brainOf Man, still redder Nero that conceived the deathOf his mother Earth, and toreHer womb, to know the place where he was conceived.

You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he should appear at Nero’s shows, taking part in the performance himself, Agrippinus replied, ‘Appear by all means.’ And when Florus inquired, ‘But why do not you appear?’ he answered, ‘Because I do not even consider the question.’

Of all the difficulties in a state, the temper of a true government most felicifies and perpetuates it; too sudden alterations distemper it. Had Nero tuned his kingdom as he did his harp, his harmony had been more honorable, and his reign more prosperous.

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers – as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.

Men call their sons Paul and their dogs Nero today.

Thus Nero went up and down Greece and challenged the fiddlers at their trade. Æropus, a Macedonian king, made lanterns; Harcatius, the king of Parthia, was a mole-catcher; and Biantes, the Lydian, filed needles.

He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.

The first persecution of the Church took place in the year 67, under Nero, the sixth emperor of Rome.

It’s not evil that’s ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

Punishment [by Nero] was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.

They say that Nero started the fire himself because he needed a suitable backdrop for his concert.

Paul was Nero’s prisoner, but Nero was much more God’s.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?…We see a game beyond the endgame…As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

We haven’t done anything. That has devolved into a partisan bickering of the kind that says Nero was fiddling while Rome burned.

I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know. (Nero Wolfe)

Pliny the Elder, who when Rome was burning requested Nero to play You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille. Never got a dinner!

I’m sure that Nero didn’t set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932.