# Annals - Author: [Tacitus](https://www.leafyquotes.com/tacitus.md) - Quotes: 20 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/tacitus/annals ## Quotes > Great empires are not maintained by timidity. > To every man posterity gives his due honour. > The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise. > Every great example of punishment has in it some injustice, but the suffering individual is compensated by the public good. > Lust of absolute power is more burning than all the passions. > A woman after having parted with her virtue will hesitate at nothing. > When men of talents are punished, authority is strengthened. > The younger men had been born after the victory of Actium; most even of the elder generation, during the civil wars; few indeed were left who had seen the Republic. It was thus an altered world, and of the old, unspoilt Roman character not a trace lingered. Equality was an outworn creed, and all eyes looked to the mandate of the sovereign, ... > He had not even adopted Tiberius as his successor out of affection or any regard to the State, but, having thoroughly seen his arrogant and savage temper, he had sought glory for himself by a contrast of extreme wickedness. > The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government. > No doubt, there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood. > No honour was left for the gods, when Augustus chose to be himself worshipped with temples and statues, like those of the deities, and with flamens and priests. > The histories of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred. Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus - more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed. > The busts of twenty most illustrious families were borne in the procession, with the names of Manlius, Quinctius, and others of equal rank. But Cassius and Brutus outshone them all, from the very fact that their likenesses were not to be seen. > He had talents equal to business, and aspired no higher. > So true is it that all transactions of preeminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity. > What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent. > He upbraided Macro, in no obscure and indirect terms, "with forsaking the setting sun and turning to the rising". > For I deem it to be the chief function of history to rescue merit from oblivion, and to hold up before evil words and evil deeds the terror of the reprobation of posterity. Topics: [history](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/history.md) > The name [Christians] was derived from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judæa. By that event the sect, of which he was the founder, received a blow, which, for a time, checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigour, not only in Judæa, the soil that gave it birth, but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which every thing infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world. Topics: [religion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/religion.md), [history](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/history.md)