“The wolf legends demanded immediate revenge. Groups of colonists entered the forest, killed the predators, and restored their mastery over nature in a day… the legends offered a quick solution: regeneration through violence”
Source: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
“They destroyed wolves for a host of pragmatic reasons: to safeguard livestock, to knit local ecosystems into global capitalist markets, to collect state-sponsored bounties, and to rid the world of beasts they considered evil, wild, corrupt, and duplicitous.”
Source: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
“To overpower savagery one must lash out savagely. In their stories Euro-American colonists invented and broadcast a vision of wolves as threats to human safety. They then modeled their behavior on the ferocity they perceived in wolves. Thus folklore explains not only why humans destroyed wolves but why they did so with such cruel enthusiasm.”
Source: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
“They saluted the last wolves. Sure, they devoured property, but they did so with enthusiasm and panache. The animals had to die, but the humans felt nostalgic about their passing.”
Source: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
“Urban Americans lost the tactile experience of raising food. They neither heard the squeals, nor smelled he offal, nor saw the blood, nor tasted the rage when predators swallowed a cherished investment.”
Source: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
“As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.”
Source: A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome
“I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.”
Source: Antony and Cleopatra
“When [Servius Galba] was a commoner he seemed too big for his station, and had he never been emperor, no one would have doubted his ability to reign.”
Source: The Histories
“Thoughts and lips can lie, feelings concealed, but scent will betray even the most careful of spies. The scent will silently tell the truth”
“Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're dead'.”
Source: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome