Quotes About Bread And Circuses

#1. An easily manipulated population that cares mostly for its own amusement may be more ready for tyranny (which can keep the masses happy with "bread and circuses") than for the arduous responsibilities of self-government.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

#2. Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt

Juvenal

#3. Two things only the people actually desire: bread and circuses.

Juvenal

#4. Anyone who speaks Latin (gets egged by the populace for being a nerd) must have wondered from the start if Panem was a reference to the Roman people's reported liking for bread and circuses - for instant gratification that would distract them from the harsher realities of life.

Leah Wilson

#5. I read the Romans had bread and circuses. We had home relief and boxing.

Jake LaMotta

#6. The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.

Chris Hedges

#7. After all, why leave your house when you can live vicariously through a dumb kid willing to risk his life for your amusement? Bread and circuses. That's all we are.

Mira Grant

#8. Panem et Circenses translates into 'Bread and Circuses.' The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.

Orson Scott Card

#9. The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!

Herbert Marcuse

#10. We love against the night, burning like stars against the darkness of bread and circuses.

David Paul Kirkpatrick

#11. There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.

Iain Sinclair

#12. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it ... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'.

Robert A. Heinlein

#13. In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.

Blaise Pascal

#14. It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.

Cormac McCarthy

#15. Spectacular sporting events are bread & circuses. The Superbowl, for instance, is anything but "super". It is a Petri dish under the lens of mediaocrity, where surveillance of the spectators is just as mind numbing as the incomprehensible homo-erotic beefcake ballet being enacted on the pitch

Dean Cavanagh

#16. Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

Gaston Bachelard

#17. In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

Scarlett Thomas

#18. Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

Bill Gates

#19. Belonging to the working class is the economy's punishment for those who did what they were told to do in class.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#20. If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph

Bruce Gilden

#21. We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Voltaire

#22. So put your costume on, honey! Ruby said. Set Harlequin free! That party monster of yours is screaming to come out. Let the monster out!

Tom Spanbauer