Here’s sound counsel for our politicians today:
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.
~ a quote from Roman statesman, Cicero, in the year 55 BC.
Obviously, we’ve learned nothing in thousands of years.
Or, we simply ignore history and are destined to repeat it.
Okay, we know Cicero’s advice is nothing more than an urban legend. But doesn’t this make a great statement?!
Note: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/cicero.asp
Those words were never uttered by Cicero, however, and the reason no one ever quoted them as such until about fifty years ago is because they weren’t written until 1965. They sprang from the pen of Taylor Caldwell, a fiction writer best known for historical novels such as Captains and the Kings, her 1972 best-selling chronicle of the rise to wealth and power of an Irish immigrant named Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh