From this I conclude that the best education for the situations of actual life consists of the experience we acquire from the study of serious history. Welcome back. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence. Now in all political situations we must understand that the principle factor which makes for success or failure is the form of a state's constitution: it is from this source, as if from a fountainhead, that all designs and plans of action not only originate but reach their fulfillment.” -- Polybius, “That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard.”, “Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.”, “All things are subject to decay and change...”, “How highly should we honor the Macedonians, who for the greater part of their lives never cease from fighting with the barbarians for the sake of the security of Greece? ', 'If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale. “Polybius: the histories”, Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and, There is a mistake in the text of this quote. Free Daily Quotes. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.” But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? When the ancients said a work well begun was half done, they meant to impress the importance of always endeavoring to make a good beginning. Polybius (1812). “If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.” -- Polybius, “A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible.” -- Polybius, “Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. Discover Polybius famous and rare quotes. In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew. On such a ship, the crew do their duty outstandingly well as long as fear of the open sea or the threat of a storm induces them to cooperate with one another and obey the helmsman. For kingship it is . And in due course of time, once democracy turns to violating and breaking the law, mob-rule arises and completes the series.”, “[T]here can be no doubt that we should take the best system of government to be the one that combines [kingship, aristocracy, and democracy]. And what happens is that often, even after crossing the widest stretches of open sea and surviving the most furious storms, they founder in harbour or close to land.”, “He indeed who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a fairly just view of history as a whole, is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one, who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.”, “The test of true virtue in a man surely resides in his capacity to bear with spirit and with dignity the most complete transformations of fortune,”, “Ephorus in a hasty sentence of his preface, wholly unworthy of him, says, that music was introduced among mankind for the purpose of deception and jugglery;”, “[E]very political system has a source of corruption growing within it, from which it is inseparable.
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