Cicero Quotes On Yesterday About Today

“The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”

“What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.”

“We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.”

“The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.”

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”

“If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.”

“Laws are silent in times of war.”

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:

Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;

Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;

Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;

Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;

Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;

Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”

“The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret -- that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.”

“Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.”

“It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.”

“A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.”

Cicero was born 106 BC and died 43 BC