“I would rather save the life of one citizen than kill a thousand enemies.”

— Scipio Africanus

...malle se unum civem servare quam mille hostes occidere.

According to the Historia Augusta (fourth century), Roman emperor Antoninus Pius often repeated this saying of Scipio ("Antoninus Pius", 9.10); no earlier attribution to Scipio (or mention of the dictum itself, for that matter) is known.
Disputed

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I would rather save the life of one citizen than kill a thousand enemies." by Scipio Africanus?

Scipio Africanus3

Roman general in the Second Punic War -235–-183 BC

Related quotes

“Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.”

Alice Sebold (1963) American writer

“The trouble with most entrepreneurs is that they would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.115

“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle. I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Some historians have opined that the assassination quip was in response to an assassination threat Lincoln had been notified about earlier.
1860s, Speech in Independence Hall (1861)

“I would never have surrendered, because of my pledge as a German officer. But when Hitler died, that pledge ended. By killing himself, Hitler saved thousands of lives. They relieved us of our oaths as soldiers.”

Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) Austrian SS-Standartenführer (colonel) in the German Waffen-SS

To Jack Bell of the Chicago Daily News, as quoted in Scoop : An Historical Adventure (2006) by James H. Walters, p. 34.

“I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at last to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial personative of force and murder; and so I would —ten thousand thousand times.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Soliloquy at the tomb of Napoleon (1882); noted to have been misreported as "I would rather be the humblest peasant that ever lived … at peace with the world than be the greatest Christian that ever lived" by Billy Sunday (May 26, 1912), as reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 52-53.