What mean you, fellow-citizens, that you thus turn every stone to scrape wealth together, yet take so little care of your children, to whom, one day, you must relinquish it all?

Even as a young officer he was such a hard drinker that his name, Tiberius Claudius Nero, was displaced by the nickname ‘Biberius Caldius Mero’ – meaning: ‘Drinker of hot wine with no water added’.

Is crime consonant with nobility?
Then noblest is the crime of tyranny.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motion. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.

Emperors are necessarily wretched men since only their assassination can convince the public that the conspiracies against their lives are real.

For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute.

Their silence was of no ordinary kind.

Oh, who can tell? Not thou, luxurious slave!
Whose soul would sicken o’er the heaving wave;
Not thou, vain lord of wantonness and ease!
Whom slumber soothes not — pleasure cannot please —
Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o’er the waters wide;
The exulting sense — the pulse’s maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?

If this hell’s-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease?

A citizen of London, being in the country, and hearing a horse neigh, exclaimed, Lord! how that horse laughs! A by-stander telling him that noise was called neighing, the next morning, when the cock crowed, the citizen to shew he had not forgot what was told him, cried out, Do you hear how the cock neighs? [fiat “Cockney”]