Terence Quotes
Too much liberty corrupts us all.
Terence. The Comedies of Terence. Translated by Henry Thomas Riley, Harper & Brothers, 1853, p. 176.
Urging a presidential veto of a tough ethics law prohibiting unethical behavior on the part of government officials:
He was expelled from Parliament for such.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
Perhaps the most famous quotation in all of Political Science is this one. What is fascinating is that 74 years earlier, Shelly, the most famous of the English Poets expressed the same idea in one of his great poems. See {627920}. The last sentence of this quote is often excluded.
This is a variation of the famous Lord Acton quote {292904}.
Publius Terentius Afer (c. 195/185 – c. 159? BC), better known in English as Terence, was a Roman African playwright during the Roman Republic. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave, educated him and later on, impressed by his abilities, freed him. Terence abruptly died, around the age of 25, likely in Greece or on his way back to Rome, due to shipwreck or disease. He was supposedly on his way to explore and find more plots to base his comedies on. Terence's legacy is one that includes his plays being heavily used to learn to speak and write in Latin during the Middle Ages and Renaissance Period, as well as to be imitated by Shakespeare in some of his plays.
