Marcus Tullius Cicero 106 BC– 43 BC

"Politicians are not born; they are excreted."

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

"Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:

Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do."

"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul."

"Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes
in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead."

"Not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child."

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others."

"Laws are silent in times of war."

"What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some
gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful
course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious."

"It is a great thing to know your vices."

"If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it."

"We must not say every mistake is a foolish one."

"Freedom is participation in power."

"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason
why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."

"God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by
government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice."

"To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die."

"Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either."

"A happy life consists in tranquility of mind."

"The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another
blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can
invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret - that man is black at heart: mark and avoid
him."

"The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil."

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced,
the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign
lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead
of living on public assistance"

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from
within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all
the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he
speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals
to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works
secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic
so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."