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Theodor Mommsen Quotes
1817–1903 Germany
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (30 November 1817 – 1 November 1903) was a German classical scholar, jurist and historian, generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, and was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments.
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23 quotes
Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
Absolute power by virtue of its very nature withdraws itself from all specification.
Posterity has justified more the policy of conquest than that of concession.
The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man.
Mankind have infinite difficulty in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms as sacred heirlooms.
Mischievous and ill-disposed lads are very inconvenient, but not more than inconvenient, in the household as in commonwealth.
The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.
History has a Nemesis for every sin—for an impotent craving after freedom, as well as for an injudicious generosity.
An independent state does not pay too dear for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them
The czech skull is impervious to reason, but it is scuceptible to blows.
All power, as well as all the impotence of democracy is based on faith
..any revolution or any usurpation is justified before the bar of history by the exclusive ability govern, even its rigorous judgement must acknowledge that the corporation duly comprehended and worthily fulfilled its great task.
The ancient boundary of Italy on the north was not the Alps but the Apennines.
[the] qualities -those of good soldiers but bad citizens - explain the historical fact, that the celts have shaken states everywhere,but founded none.
Bloodless victories are often feeble and dangerous
It is no easy task for a state any more than for a man to become reconciled to insignificance; it is the duty and right of the ruler either to renounce his authority, or by the display of an imposing material superiority to compel the ruled to resignation.
Revolutions have nowhere ended, and least of all in ROme, without demanding a certain number of victims, who under forms more or less borrowed from justice atone fro the fault of defeat as though it were a crime.
The history of the Jewish land is as little the history of the Jewish people as the history of the States of the Church is that of the Catholics; it is just as requisite to separate the two as to consider them together.
The highest revelations of humanity are perishable; the religion once true may become a lie, the polity once fraught with blessing may become a curse; but even the gospel that is past still finds confessors, and if such a faith cannot remove mountains like faith in the living truth, it yet remains true to itself down to its very end, and does not depart from the realm of the living till it has dragged its last priest and its last partisans along with it, and a new generation, freed from those shadows of the past and the perishing, rules over a world that has renewed its youth.
Of all pitiful parts none is more pitiful than passing for more than one really is; and it is the fate of monarchy that this misfortune inevitably clings to it, for barely once in a thousand years does there arise among the people a man who is king not merely in name, but in reality.
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