Quotes About Ancient Rome

#1. 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.

Barry Goldwater

#2. Washington, D.C., with its wide streets, confounding roundabouts, marble statues, Doric columns, and domes, is supposed to feel like ancient Rome (that is, if the streets of ancient Rome were lined with homeless black people, bomb-sniffing dogs, tour buses, and cherry blossoms).

Paul Beatty

#3. The dumb masses were always the easiest to persuade. The bread-and-circus concept had worked in ancient Rome, and it still worked today.

James Garmisch

#4. The hermit, without access to the news of the day, owes it to himself to be up to date on the doings of ancient Rome.

Sylvain Tesson

#5. 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.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#6. Ancient Rome was a violent place.

James Purefoy

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

Caroline Lawrence

#8. 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.

Henry Cavill

#9. 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 ...

Edward Gibbon

#10. The horses forced into the chuckwagon races die of heart attacks, broken necks, broken legs, and other injuries. It'd be easy to get off on western tradition without this bloody spectacle. Dude, it's the Old West, not ancient Rome!

Tommy Lee

#11. Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.

Matt Ridley

#12. 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.

Edward Thomson

#13. We stand todaybefore the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.

Rosa Luxemburg

#14. 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.

Edward Gibbon

#15. We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English?

Edward Rutherfurd

#16. 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.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#17. [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.

George Lucas

#18. 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.

Arthur Erickson

#19. Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

Will Rogers

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

Michael Mandelbaum

#21. 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.

Jeremy Bolt

#22. 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.

Bernie Taupin

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

Arthur Helps

#24. Going after a part in Hollywood is like being a gladiator in ancient Rome. When it comes down to getting a role, you don't have any friends, you're incredibly competitive and any actor who tells you different is lying.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers

#25. OVATION, n. n ancient Rome, a definite, formal pageant in honor of one who had been disserviceable to the enemies of the nation. A lesser "triumph."

Ambrose Bierce

#26. Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful.

Philip Yancey

#27. Today, as in ancient Rome, when all avenues of success have been traveled and all prizes won, the final prize is the delusion of godhead.

David Mamet

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

John Barrowman

#29. All his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.

Kingsley Amis

#30. From food trucks to hot dog stands to county fair favorites, 'street food' has enjoyed a rich and storied history in American cuisine. However, street food has been around for thousands of years. In fact, street food is believed to have originated as far back as Ancient Rome.

Homaro Cantu

#31. If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.

Jonah Goldberg

#32. The slightest nudge can send a fruit pyramid collapsing into ruin. Perhaps this is why there is so little ancient architecture and art left in the world. Perhaps ancient fat people bumped into buildings and statues and made them fall. Perhaps this is the real reason Rome fell

Becky Siame

#33. It was as if all my life had been spent fighting, killing and running. I wanted peace but I knew it was unattainable. I had to return and rule my people...

Fredrik Nath

#34. Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in The Omniconstant

Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis

#35. Harder! Harder! Strike at it, for the gods' sake! It's a Parthian, not your grandmother! I swear if you don't put some effort into - What?

M.C. Scott

#36. We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.

Peter Singer

#37. Nothing makes sense in Rome.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#38. US tourists caught carving names into Rome's Colosseum Two California women break away from tour group to scratch their initials into ancient amphitheatre, where defacing walls is strictly forbidden

Anonymous

#39. They say the eyes are the apertures to the soul. If that is so, I feared Locusta's soul was far darker than even Nero's.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#40. there are men who are ancient and determined enemies of the Church of Rome who live in perpetual hope of its destruction

Glenn Cooper

#41. In the Classical tradition, deriving from ancient Greece and Rome, beauty was perceived as the means by which the artist captured the viewer's eye in order to engage the viewer with truth and so inspire goodness.

John Walford

#42. He lay tensed beneath the worn blanket and tried, as always, to shut out the noise of the rumbling carts that, empty now, having deposited their loads at the warehouses south of the Aventine hill, were moving up to the Aemilius bridge.

Wallace Breem

#43. Maximus said, "They have no tombstones. Not one man in Treverorum wept for their passing." he looked at his audience in turn and smiled. "In the name of Mithras, my master, may the gods be kind to you on your journey.

Wallace Breem

#44. The failure of the roman system to furnish decent minimal standards for the mass of people was a fundamental cause of instability, both political and economic.

H.J. Haskell

#45. Centurion! Would you like to be a cavalryman one last time? There are Venicones who escaped when your line was broken to be hunted down, and Tribune Licinius has ordered me to take the best men available in their pursuit. Leave this hairy gentleman to watch the fun, and join us in the hunt!

Anthony Riches

#46. The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes.

Noah Webster

#47. The strands (the gods) weave out of our mortal lives are like a pattern visible only from the heavens; we here on earth can only guess at their designs

Steven Saylor

#48. The wheel of Rome spins constantly. Gods rise and fall, mortals live and die, and round and round we go. We all play a part in that wheel ... And I make sure the wheel never stops spinning. You see, if the wheel stops, balance is lost.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#49. [Christians] are people such as the world has not seen hitherto, and their teaching is of a kind that the world has not heard up to this time ...

Henryk Stanczyk

#50. Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.

Henry Fuseli

#51. We broke camp together and set off in our opposite directions: we of the XIIth and our allies marched east, towards the rising sun, combat and honour; the IVth went west, to the setting sun, to ignominy and a wealth of digging. We sang as we marched. They did not.

M.C. Scott

#52. Francis walked in a solemn Ash Wednesday procession between churches on Rome's ancient Aventine Hill, calling on people to humbly remember their human limits.

Anonymous

#53. Oh, river! darkling river! what a voice
Is that thou utterest while all else is still
The ancient voice that, centuries ago,
Sounded between thy hills, while Rome was yet
A weedy solitude by Tiber's stream!

William C. Bryant

#54. ...the guy might be a cold-blooded amoral sadistic killer and a cartload of tiles short of a watertight roof, but there was nothing wrong with his intelligence. [Caligula in Marcus Corvinus's eyes]

David Wishart

#55. I am praetor of the legion," Reyna said. "I judge this to be in the best interest of Rome."
"To get yourself killed? To break our oldest laws and travel to the Ancient Lands? How will you even find their ship, assuming you survive the journey?" [Octavian]
"I will find them," Reyna said.

Rick Riordan

#56. a poker-rectumed pillar of the establishment [Marcus Corvinus on a Roman Senator]

David Wishart

#57. Most women run from danger like mice from a cat. You turn into a lion and take whatever comes. [Aurelia as seen by her brother.]

Jane Finnis

#58. My tongue tasted like a gladiator's jockstrap [Marcus Corvinus after a night out]

David Wishart

#59. These pastoral-poet guys with their bleating goats and oaten pipes can stuff their phalaecean hendecasyllabics where the sun don't shine.

David Wishart

#60. I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.

Camille Paglia

#61. Three old men with moon-silver hair and slow, ponderous movement took him in their arms and laid him on a marble slab and set silver coins on his eyes and swung incense over him, murmuring as
priests do to fill what might otherwise be a god-sent silence.

M.C. Scott

#62. But, new soldier that I was, I understood at last what Cadus had been trying to tell me all along: that life and love and rank were not enough. To be whole in myself, I needed honour, and I had lost it, and could see no way to get it back.

M.C. Scott

#63. Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

James Joyce

#64. A man who had the legions of the east marching at his back could be bred by a donkey on a mule and the senate would have no choice but to accept him.

M.C. Scott

#65. I had come to Rome in chains, but I would leave Rome a queen.

Stephanie Dray

#66. I kept secrets from you. I let you believe a lie. I am an impious son. But I made my choice, as C(aesar) did, and once the Rubicon is crossed, there can be no turning back (Meto, Caesar's scribe, to his father Gordianus the Finder)

Steven Saylor

#67. Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur.
If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.

Horace

#68. Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium

Horace

#69. In the long run, the fall of one civilization is very much like the fall of another. Only the land remains.

Morgan Llywelyn

#70. I should rather take my chances with the lions of Rome's ancient Colosseum than endure another tea chat with the likes of them. At least the lions are honest about their desire to eat you and make no effort to hide it.

Libba Bray

#71. Over most of the one thousand years of philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome, philosophy was assiduously studied in every generation by many ancient philosophers and their students as the best way to become good people and to live good human lives.

John M. Cooper

#72. Even during the period when Rome lost much of her ancient prestige, an Indian traveler observed that trade all over the world was operated with the aid of Roman gold coins which were accepted and admired everywhere.

Paul Einzig

#73. Rome versus the Visigoths, Ancient Egypt versus the Hyksos, Aztecs versus the Spaniards.

Margaret Atwood

#74. In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.

Peggy Noonan

#75. I'd say it was a pleasure rowing with you, only it wasn't.

Jennifer McKeithen

#76. Given of the god,
Given to the god,
Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory.
May you journey safely to your destination.

M.C. Scott

#77. In an empire as unruly as Rome, it is quite easy to get away with something as thespian as murder.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#78. When boyhood's fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen
Of Greece and Rome who bravely stood
Three hundred men and three men

And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain
And Ireland long a province be
A nation once again

Thomas Osborne Davis

#79. Even freed men will do what they must in Rome.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#80. I at least know what I am and do not try to hide it from the rest of the world. Do you know what you are? Because you can only be one thing at a time.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#81. Demalion, we're alive.' Pantera's voice was unusually clipped, as if his patience had finally run to an end. 'If we were trying to get ourselves killed, we three would have managed it, I think. Two officers of the Fifth and a spy trained by Seneca could manage that much at least.

M.C. Scott

#82. the emperor had chewed off his balls and stuffed a one-way ticket to the Black Sea up his rectum [Marcus Corvinus explains what happened to Ovid]

David Wishart

#83. We speed through the streets past modern buildings and ancient architecture. Gazing through the taxi window Rome becomes a wet painting someone has wiped a hand across.

Kevin James Moore

#84. Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that's living (venari lavare ludere ridere occest vivere).

Mary Beard

#85. I found out later than even an education and a cushioned introduction to power cannot make a great leader.

Fredrik Nath

#86. Selene's life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women's equality hasn't always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future.

Stephanie Dray

#87. In the centre of our line, eighty paces to my left, I felt Cadus raise his hand; I did not need to look.
'Sound,' he said. That was all.

M.C. Scott

#88. Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and
brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?

Polybius

#89. You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

#90. Remember these Romans, Hannibal. For the time being, we must ally with them. But the day will come when we will have our vengeance upon them, as we will upon the demons of Harappa. Never forget that."

The boy's voice was grave. "I'll remember.

Jennifer McKeithen

#91. Every day you live is a lesson in itself.

T.A. Uner