Tacitus Quotes
The powerful hold in deep remembrance an ill-timed pleasantry.
[Lat., Facetiarum apud praepotentes in longum memoria est.]
Tacitus, Cornelius. The Annals of Tacitus. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, Macmillan and Co., 1876, p. 147.
6th Baron Byron. This is one of the more eloquent descriptions of the long historical memory which keeps alive the thirst for vengeance. The Irish revolutionist, James Connolly, 1868-1916, quoted these lines in one of his great polemics, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897
Scientists are notorious contemptuous of authorities and authority especially in the scientific arena. They generally follow the philosophical doctrine of Spinosa who counted authority as nothing when compared with observation and reason. In this sense, they are problems for authoritarian leaders especially. Einstein when younger had little respect for many of the so called “great professors” of physics and chemistry. He was considered disrespectful at best. He would argue that just because a man was a great professor or scientist did not necessarily make him right on any given issue and indeed he challenged the entire method of thinking about the world. However, then he became the great professor and the foile which he always disparaged.
For an alternate version of this concept, see Szasz {47194}
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.
