Famous Cicero Quotes Explained
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, orator, lawyer, and philosopher of the late Roman Republic, who served as consul in 63 BC and was murdered in 43 BC during the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate. Cicero's surviving letters, speeches, and philosophical dialogues have supplied Western political prose with epigrams for two thousand years. Below are eight of the most-quoted, with notes on where they fit in his thought.
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil.
What it means
Attributed to Cicero by later anthologists; the saying is not located verbatim in his surviving works. It compresses the Roman literary ideal of otium cum dignitate — dignified leisure — that Cicero defends repeatedly in his letters and in the De Officiis: a self-sufficient life of study and cultivation, free of political dependence.
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
Reddite igitur, patres conscripti, ei vitam, cui ademistis. Vita enim mortuorum in memoria est posita vivorum.
What it means
From Cicero's funeral oration Philippic IX, delivered for Servius Sulpicius Rufus. The line argues that the dead persist in the moral and civic memory of those they shaped, a Roman variant of immortality through reputation. Cicero believed glory earned by service to the republic was the only lasting form of survival.
Attributed to Cicero:
“While there's life, there's hope.”
What it means
A proverb of Roman origin attributed to Cicero in the Letters to Atticus, written during the civil war as Cicero counselled patience to friends contemplating exile. The line treats hope as a duty rather than an emotion: while a citizen lives, the obligation to act for the republic does not lapse.
“Friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.”
Nam et secundas res splendidiores facit amicitia et adversas partiens communicansque leviores.
What it means
From De Amicitia (On Friendship), Cicero's dialogue on the nature of amicitia set among the friends of Scipio Aemilianus. Cicero's claim is that friendship is not an instrumental good but a multiplier of every other good and a divider of every burden, possible only between people of equal virtue.
Attributed to Cicero:
“Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offence.”
What it means
From De Officiis, Cicero's late treatise on moral duty. The two clauses separate Cicero's account of justice from his account of decorum: justice is the negative duty not to harm, while decency is the positive duty to behave without giving avoidable offence. The treatise was the most widely read of all Cicero's works in medieval Europe.
Attributed to Cicero:
“We are servants of the laws so that we may be free.”
What it means
From Pro Cluentio, one of Cicero's defence speeches, and echoed in De Legibus. The paradox is that subjection to law is what makes liberty possible: a citizen without law is at the mercy of arbitrary power. The formulation became foundational for later republican and constitutional theory.
Attributed to Cicero:
“The safety of the people shall be the highest law.”
What it means
Salus populi suprema lex esto — the line is from De Legibus (On the Laws), Book III. Cicero is restating an old Roman magisterial principle that the welfare of the citizenry is the standard against which any statute or magistrate must ultimately be judged. The phrase appears as the motto of the State of Missouri and the City of Salford, among others.
“History is truly the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity; whose voice, but the orator's, can entrust her to immortality?”
De Oratore–On the Orator(55 BC) | Book II, Chapter 9, section 36
What it means
From De Oratore, Book II, where Cicero argues for the rhetorical and ethical importance of historical study. History, in his account, is not antiquarian collection but the schoolroom of public life: the deeds of the past furnish examples without which deliberation in the present is uninformed.