Tacitus Quotes


A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.


Citations

Tacitus, Cornelius. The Histories. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, Macmillan and Co., 1873, p. 25.

Related Quotes

This poster's distribution before the JFK murder, has fed numerous conspiracy theories that right wing extremists were behind the assassination.


Turner exposed many of the illegal activities of the FBI including “black bag jobs,” warrantless searches, bugs and wiretaps and criticized the FBI for avoiding investigations of organized crime. He had personally been directed to engage in these activities. When he went public, he was fired but no one has denied the specifics of the illegal activities he reported in his books and articles.


In the quoted passage, it describes Diogenes as observing a thief being arrested in one of the religious temples by the officials of the temple. He had pilfered one of the temple treasures. Not unlike modern times, most religious organizations raised money be getting donations from the public. Some of the means of many of the religious groups are and have been of dubious morality and if used in commerce would generally be considered fraud. This quotation shows that this is not a new phenomenon nor was it limited to monotheistic religions.


To depose President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam Conein was one of the first American intelligence operatives in Vietnam. Diem was a creature of the Central Intelligence Agency. An anti-Communist Christian in a Buddhist county, the CIA engineered his rise to power, created his political party, provided him with cash to bribe other Vietnamese politicians, and paid for all the propaganda so he would “win” the Presidential elections. However, he abused the Buddhists, was thoroughly corrupt and ran a corrupt administration, but worst of all from the American point of view, he was unable to motivate the South Vietnamese population to fight the Communists. He reached the point where he was more of a liability, and the CIA, through Conein, engineered a coup d’etat to remove him from power and replace him with a President more to our liking. Though not planned that way, the South Vietnam military officers who we backed in the coup, then murdered Diem, who although ineffective and unsuccessful, had been a friend and ally of the United States. Even President Kennedy felt badly about the outcome. See {634539}.


Tacitus
Tacitus
  • Born:
  • Nationality: Roman
  • Profession: Historian

Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – c. 120) was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature, and has a reputation for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics.