Great Throughts Treasury

"They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace."

"Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so."

"They shone forth the more that they were not seen."

"Thou wast indeed fortunate, Agricola, not only in the splendor of thy life, but in the opportune moment of thy death."

"To prefer victory to peace."

"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."

"This is in the sense that the matrimonial bond was strictly observed by the Germanic peoples, this being compared favorably against licentiousness in Rome. Tacitus appears to hold the fairly strict monogamy (with some exceptions among nobles who marry again) between Germanic husbands and wives, and the chastity among the unmarried to be worthy of the highest praise."

"To resist violence is implanted in the nature of man."

"To rob, to ravage, to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace."

"Traitors are hated even by those whom they prefer."

"Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay: falsehood by haste and uncertainty."

"We accomplish more by prudence than by force."

"Valor is the contempt of death and pain."

"We are corrupted by good fortune."

"We praise old times, but show no curiosity about modern events."

"We extol ancient things, regardless of our own times."

"Who, to say nothing about the perils of an awful and unknown sea, would have left Asia or Africa or Italy to look for Germany?"

"Yet the age was not so utterly destitute of virtues but that it produced some good examples."

"When men of talents are punished, authority is strengthened."

"When a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from nothing."

"Zealous in the commencement, careless in the end."