Tacitus Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

Style, like the human body, is specially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted.

Tacitus
Their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They choose dark nights for battle, and, by the dread and gloomy aspect of their death-like host, strike terror into the foe, who can never confront their strange and almost infernal appearance.

Tacitus
All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.

Tacitus
Great eloquence, like fire, grows with its material; it becomes fiercer with movement, and brighter as it burns.

Tacitus
They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses, with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes, was formerly discovered on the same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhaetia.

Tacitus
Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.

Tacitus
Some might consider him as too fond of fame; for the desire for glory clings even to the best men longer than any other passion.

Tacitus
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Tacitus
Good habits are here more effectual than good laws elsewhere.

Tacitus
He [Nerva] has united things long incompatible, the principate and liberty.

Tacitus
The desire of glory is the last infirmity cast off even by the wise.

Tacitus
No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

Tacitus
It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.

Tacitus
To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire, they make a wilderness and call it peace.

Tacitus
Those whose habit it is to admire what is forbidden ought to know that there can be great men even under bad emperors.

Tacitus
There was more courage in bearing trouble than in escaping from it; the brave and the energetic cling to hope, even in spite of fortune; the cowardly and the indolent are hurried by their fears,' said Plotius Firmus, Roman Praetorian Guard.

Tacitus
Every great example of punishment has in it some injustice, but the suffering individual is compensated by the public good.

Tacitus
Under Domitian not the smallest part of one's misery was to see and be seen.

Tacitus
It is part of human nature to hate the man you have hurt.

Tacitus
What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

Tacitus
Of Servius Galba:
He seemed more important than a private citizen while he was a private citizen, and in the opinion of all he was capable of rule—if he had not ruled.

Tacitus
The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.

Tacitus
These times having the rare good fortune that you may think what you like and say what you think.

Tacitus
He upbraided Macro, in no obscure and indirect terms, "with forsaking the setting sun and turning to the rising".

Tacitus
Think, therefore, as you advance to battle, at once of your ancestors and your posterity.

Tacitus
To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.

Tacitus
Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims.

Tacitus
All this is unauthenticated, and I shall leave it open.

Tacitus
Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.

Tacitus
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

Tacitus