Category: Thought

The old Romans all wished to have a king over them because they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom.

Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita (History of Rome; 27–9 B.C.), Book I, sec. 17.

Necessitas etiam timidos fortes facit.

Necessity makes even the timid brave.

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Bellum Catilinae (c. 44 BC), Chapter LVII.

Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.

Publius Tacitus, Histories (100 A.D.), Book One.

Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.

Publius Tacitus, Agricola (98 A.D.), Chapter 42.

Force shites upon Reason’s Back.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1736).

I don’t regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.

Orson Welles, in an interview with Bernie Braden in Paris (1960).

We do not recommend suicide as a way of life.

Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1965).

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

Orson Welles, in an interview from Hollywood Voices (1971), Andrew Sarris, editor.

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Orson Welles, in the published screenplay for The Big Brass Ring (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Teresa Press, 1987).