The love of dominion is the most engrossing passion.

Indeed, the crowning proof of their valour and their strength is that they keep up their superiority without harm to others.

Even honor and virtue make enemies, condemning, as they do, their opposites by too close a contrast.

They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.

You might believe a good man easily, a great man with pleasure. -Bonum virum facile crederes, magnum libenter

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.

Conspicuous by his absence.