Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ambrose Bierce

Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity.

Bernardo Bertolucci

Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere... terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.

Edward Gibbon

The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire, with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities, which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.

Edward Gibbon

Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire, the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind; and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise the improvements of social life.

Edward Gibbon

At the hour of midnight the Salerian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilised so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.

Eddie Izzard

America is the new Roman Empire. Remember what happened to Rome.

Arthur Erickson

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

Anthony Trollope

Caveat emptor is the only motto going, and the worst proverb that ever came from the dishonest stony-hearted Rome.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.

Juvenal

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal

Everything in Rome has its price.

Edward Gibbon

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

Charles Caleb Colton

Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.

C. Wright Mills

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

William Shakespeare

Take it in what sense thou wilt.

William Shakespeare

The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness.

Benjamin Tucker

For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.

Carlos Moya

It's not easy to play your best for 40 weeks. It happens every year, I don't play well in Rome or Hamburg -- I don't know why -- but then I play well after that.

Isaac Newton

In the reign of the Greek Emperor Justinian , and again in the reign of Phocas , the Bishop of Rome obtained some dominion over the Greek Churches, but of no long continuance. His standing dominion was only over the nations of the Western Empire, represented by Daniel's fourth Beast.

Margaret Mitchell

These three ladies disliked and distrusted one another as heartily as the First Triumvirate of Rome, and their close alliance was probably for the same reason.

Margaret Mead

Creationism: the theory that Rome was built in a day.

Margaret Fuller

Those have not lived who have not seen Rome.

Henry Adams

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

James Purefoy

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

Peter Akinola

Is the Church of England an Anglican church? The church did not start in Canterbury, the church did not start in Rome. Whether Canterbury is Anglican or not is immaterial. We are Anglicans. They are the Church of England.

Peggy Noonan

In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.

Jeff Cook

Rome is burning, and they don't seem to get it. I don't think they understand the severity of the problem.

Ron Paul

The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

Rosa Luxemburg

We stand todaybefore the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.

Suheir Hammad

The machine will grind you down, but the machine is not bigger than the imagination. Rome fell in a day. We know this.

Stephen Nichols

If you want a symbol of Roman power and strength look no further than the Praetorian or Imperial Guard. We could take this one step further. It was this world of Roman power into which Christ came, in which the Apostles ministered, in which the New Testament authors wrote, and in which Christianity came into being. And to all of those things, Rome stood opposed, violently opposed.

Stacy Schiff

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.