Seth Shostak Quotes

There hasn't been a day in my life since I started Latin in ninth grade that I haven't benefited by the lives of the ancients.

That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain.

Every one soon or late comes round by Rome.

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.

I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians.

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

We are fascinated with our own history, and we are fascinated with the Romans because they were millennia ago, and yet they still capture our imagination because they were actually so similar to us. They were very civilized. They had a very similar political system.

Eternal Rome

I've been obsessed with Romans since I was a child.

I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing. I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy, ... of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too.

Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.

Although reading the classics in Latin in school may be not as fulfilling as it would be at a more mature age, few scientists can afford the time for such diversion later in life.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

Sun Tzu does not need my praise. His work has lived for over two thousand years, and will surely live for another two thousand without any help from me.

Since my high school years, I have been interested in history, especially in Roman history, a topic on which I have read rather extensively. The Latin that goes with this kind of interest proved useful when I had to generate a few terms and names for cell biology.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.

We were all Romans once, I guess.

Rome had Senators too, that's why it declined.

The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.

Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.