Tacitus Quotes
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Rumor is not always wrong.
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When men of talents are punished, authority is strengthened.
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The customs of the Jews are base and abominable and owe their persistence to their depravity. Jews are extremely loyal to one another, always ready to show compassion, but towards every other people they feel only hate and enimity. As a race (the Jews are not a race, because they have mingled with the other races to the point that they are only a people, not a race), they are prone to lust; among themselves nothing is unlawful.
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All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.
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If we must fall, we should boldly meet our fate.
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Even honor and virtue make enemies, condemning, as they do, their opposites by too close a contrast.
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Rumor does not always err; it sometimes even elects a man.
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Tu vero felix, Agricola, non vitae tantum claritate, sed etiam opportunitate mortis.
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Our magistrates discharge their duties best at the beginning; and fall off toward the end.
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This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.
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Rulers always hate and suspect the next in succession.
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Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals.
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Other men have acquired fame by industry, but this man by indolence.
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Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant. They make a wilderness and they call it peace.
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In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.
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The hatred of those who are near to us is most violent.
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Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims.
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Reason and calm judgment, the qualities specially belonging to a leader.
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The injustice of a government is proportional to the number of its laws.
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The changeful change of circumstances.