Tacitus Quotes

Everyday decision-making around the world is constantly based on what came before us.

History serves as a model not only of who and what we are to be, we learn what to champion and what to avoid.

One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.

One precedent creates another. They soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was fact, today is doctrine.

When I grew up, which was really in the 30s and the 40s, the movies were a moral guideline for me.

The Ten Commandments don't tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.

When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.

Mistakes don't have to define us. They're how we learn and grow. They show us who and what we don't want to be. It's why they're mistakes.

Precedents once established are so much positive power.

Learning what not to do is sometimes more important than learning what to do.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

The relationship between the films and the individual Commandments [is] a tentative one. The films should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our daily lives.

If we desire rules to govern our spiritual development we turn back to the Sermon on the Mount.

A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn we learn from our mistakes and failures. — The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

My mistakes have been some of the best teachers of my life.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

As soon as the error has been recognized and corrections made, it's equally important that the error be forgotten and the successful attempt remembered and dwelt upon.

It is well for us if we have learned to listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes, but there are crises in all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" of the decalogue which the founders wrote on the gateposts of their commonwealth.

If you have made a mistake cut your losses as quickly as possible.

I know The past and thence I will essay to glean A warning for the future, so that man May profit by his errors, and derive Experience from his folly; For, when the power of imparting joy Is equal to the will, the human soul Requires no other heaven.

Morality is always higher than law and we cannot forget this ever.

I want to show that there are indeed some universal ethical principles which could help everyone to achieve the happiness we all aspire to.

Don't run your life by what's legal or illegal. Run your life based on what's right or wrong.