Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician - Quotes

Below are the quotes from the book Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt:

• Victories in the field count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home.
• Dubious means might subvert virtuous ends.
• Either the future is subject to chance--in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other--or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it.
• People naturally prefer you to lie to them rather than refuse them your help.
• Men in public life did their best to avoid accidental events or actions from being seen as unlucky. On a famous occasion during the civil war, Caesar tripped when disembarking from a ship on the shores of Africa and fell flat on his face. With his talent for improvisation, he spread out his arms and embraced the earth as a symbol of conquest. By quick thinking he turned a terrible omen of failure into one of victory.
• As the face is the image of the soul, the eyes are its translators
• A virtuous life is a highway to heaven.
• Investigation into the future can make it possible to avoid unpleasant events.
• While external factors may influence our actions, they cannot control them, for that would be to negate free will. To say “what will be, will be” is not to imply that the future is predetermined.
• Cicero’s central concern is the contradiction between virtue and the inevitable expediencies that divert human agents from the path of right conduct.
• Caesar remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than those worn by a general in his Triumph, for it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than of its empire.
• Beneath the Moon there is nothing that is not mortal and doomed to decay, except for the souls which, by the grace of the gods, have been conferred on humankind. But above the Moon everything is eternal.