“For in order to command well, we should know how to submit; and he who submits with a good grace will some time become worthy of commanding.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero , book De Legibus

Book III, section 2; translation by Francis Barham
De Legibus (On the Laws)

Original

Nam et qui bene imperat, paruerit aliquando necesse est, et qui modeste paret, videtur qui aliquando imperet dignus esse.

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 "For in order to command well, we should know how to submit; and he who submits with a good grace will some time become …" by Marcus Tullius Cicero?

Marcus Tullius Cicero 180

Roman philosopher and statesman -106–-43 BC

Related quotes

“To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince

“A general may succeed for some time in persuading his superiors that he is a good commander: he will never persuade his army that he is a good commander unless he has the real qualities of one.”

Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell (1883–1950) senior officer of the British Army

II – The General and His Troops.
"Generals and Generalship" (1939)

“The time period lying between command of goods of a higher order and possession of the corresponding goods of lower order can never be eliminated.”

Carl Menger (1840–1921) founder of the Austrian School of economics

Source: Principles,, p. 67; cited in: Randall G. Holcombe, Great Austrian Economists, p. 90

“Neighbor, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

“On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands is to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant.”

Alasdair MacIntyre book After Virtue

Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 45.

“A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Delphine

Un homme doit savoir braver l'opinion; une femme s'y soumettre.
Delphine (1802), epigraph
The epigraph is taken from the writings of de Staël's mother, Suzanne Necker.

“Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 260
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Manda quem não sente. Vence quem pensa só o que precisa para vencer.

“The idea of obligation is rationally unstable without the accompanying idea of a sufficiently good and powerful obligator to give the command and sustain the order in which the command is observed.”

John E. Hare (1949) British philosopher

Source: “Evolutionary Theory and Theological Ethics” (2012), p. 250

“Assuming… that all available goods of higher order are employed in the most economic fashion, the value of a concrete quantity of a good of higher order is equal to the difference in importance between the satisfactions that can be attained when we have command of the given quantity of the good of higher order whose value we wish to determine and the satisfactions that would be attained if we did not have this quantity at our command.”