The history of empires is the history of human misery. - Edward Gibbon

and it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy.

The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin, of Athens and Sparta. The aspiring genius of Rome sacrificed vanity to ambition, and deemed it more prudent, as well as honorable, to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or barbarians.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness