James Purefoy Quotes

Eternal Rome

Rome was great in arms, in government, in law.

Yesterday, we slaughtered them and we will continue to slaughter them.

War is not civilized.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

Roman history was kind of unavoidable where I was growing up. It was everywhere - all the place names and ruins and forts. My dad's a history buff, and I spent a lot of time on Hadrian's Wall. I became fascinated by the idea of what was so terrifying up there that the Romans built a 60-mile long, 30ft high stone wall to keep it out?

It is evident that in the period designated as that of the kings, when Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and country, a great and wealthy city.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

The Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

From the earliest dawnings of policy to this day, the invention of men has been sharpening and improving the mystery of murder, from the first rude essays of clubs and stones, to the present perfection of gunnery, cannoneering, bombarding, mining, and all those species of artificial, learned, and refined cruelty, in which we are now so expert, and which make a principal part of what politicians have taught us to believe is our principal glory.

The soldiers, being moved and much stirred with the loss of their fellows that were slain, and desirous of revenge, made request, or rather pressed to have the killing of them, which they did all …. There were slain that came out of the castle … 200… They be occupied still in killing, and have slain that they have found hidden in the caves and in the cliffs of the sea to the number of 300 to 400 more.

War is brutal, barbaric and bloody.

War,--the trade of barbarians!

The brazen throat of war.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

War is simple, direct, and ruthless.

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

Americans love to read about violence.

That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

In violence, we forget who we are.

There was living in the palace at this time a brother of the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar.