Cultural Survival Skills

A Wisdom-Laden Warning From The Past

This quote is often attributed to the Roman Statesman, Cicero (103BC – 43BC). It is actually a paraphrase from a 1965 essay by Justice Millard Caldwell. The paraphrase appears to be from the Second Catiline Oration, but drastically changes the rhetoric.

I will ask you: Can you see the specter of our now so-afflicted America in this wisdom-laden warning from the past?

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the carrier of the plague. You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him.”

The correction for this quote was found on Wikiquotes     http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cicero     This erratum is located near the bottom of the page of mistaken Cicero quotes.

VTM, 1/27/14

P. S., Thanks to John Plume for sending me this prescient quote of Justice Millard Caldwell.

Tags: A Warning To America, Cicero, Justic Millard Caldwell, Socialist Politicians, The Traitor Brings The Plague, Traitorous Politicians, V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D., VTM

This entry was posted on January 27, 2014 at 11:23 PM and is filed under Boiling the American Frog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.