Cicero Quotes on Politics
Cicero's De Re Publica and De Legibus, composed in the late 50s BC at the height of the late-Republican political crisis, gave the Roman synthesis of Greek political philosophy with Roman political experience its most influential statement. The mixed constitution — combining monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements as a single political order more stable than any of the simple forms — supplies the principal political-theoretical thesis, drawn from Polybius's analysis of the Roman constitution and shaping the medieval and early modern republican tradition through Aquinas, Machiavelli, Harrington, and the American founders. The natural-law foundation in De Legibus extends the analysis from constitutional architecture to the ground of political legitimacy in the rational order of the cosmos itself.
Quotes
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Attributed to Cicero:
“We are servants of the laws so that we may be free.”
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Attributed to Cicero:
“The safety of the people shall be the highest law.”
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“As for me, I cease not to advocate peace. It may be on unjust terms, but even so it is more expedient than the justest of civil wars. Epistulae ad Atticum (Letters to Atticus) Book VII, Letter 14, section 3; as translated by E.O. Winstedt in the Loeb Classical Library”
Equidem ad pacem hortari non desino; quae vel iniusta utilior est quam iustissimum bellum cum civibus. -
“since our leading men think themselves in a seventh heaven, if there are bearded mullets in their fish-ponds that will come to hand for food, and neglect everything else, do not you think that I am doing no mean service if I secure that those who have the power, should not have the will, to do any harm?”
Letters to Atticus, Book II, 1. -
“Injustice often arises also through chicanery, that is, through an over-subtle and even fraudulent construction of the law. This it is that gave rise to the now familiar saw, "More law, less justice."”
De Officiis–On Duties(44 BC) | Book I, section 33; translation by Walter Miller. -
“Law is the perfection of reason implanted in us by nature, which enjoins what should be done, and forbids what we should not do.”
De Legibus(On the Laws)(c. 40s BC) -
“Than a smatterer in law, wary, indeed, and a smart prater about actions, a setter-forth of forms, a captious wrangler.”
De Oratore–On the Orator(55 BC) | Book I, Chapter 55; J. W. Jones, A Translation of all the Greek, Latin, Italian, and French Quotations which Occur in Blackstone's 'Commentaries on the Laws of England', &c. (Philadelphia, PA: T. & J.