Tacitus
Roman orator, lawyer, and senator.
Et maiores vestros et posteros cogitate.
It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.
It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.
Abuse, if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated you will be thought to have deserved it.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
The Germans themselves I should regard as aboriginal, and not mixed at all with other races through immigration or intercourse. For in former times, it was not by land but on shipboard that those who sought to emigrate would arrive; and the boundless and, so to speak, hostile ocean beyond us,is seldom entered by a sail from our world.
He had talents equal to business, and aspired no higher.
He possessed a peculiar talent of producing effect in whatever he said or did.
No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.
So true is it that all transactions of preeminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity.
Tacitus has written an entire work on the manners of the Germans. This work is short, but it comes from the pen of Tacitus, who was always concise, because he saw everything at a glance.
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.
Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims.
Great empires are not maintained by timidity.
Indeed, the crowning proof of their valour and their strength is that they keep up their superiority without harm to others.
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.
…ibi boni mores valent quam alibi bonae leges.
He upbraided Macro, in no obscure and indirect terms, "with forsaking the setting sun and turning to the rising".
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.