Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 7; translated by W. K. Marriott
Chi crede che ne' personaggi grandi beneficii nuovi faccino dimenticare l'ingiurie vecchie, s'inganna.
The Prince (1513)
“Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.”
As quoted in Dictionary of foreign phrases and classical quotations (1908) by Hugh Percy Jones, p. 140
“5430. We are more mindful of Injuries than Benefits.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“Women and elephants never forget an injury.”
"Reginald on Besetting Sins"
Reginald (1904)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Context: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases.
“Wrong no man by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.”
Misattributed, Jackson's personal book of maxims
“A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing”
Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“You will next read the new testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus.”
1780s, Letter to Peter Carr (1787)
Context: You will next read the new testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions 1. of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended & reversed the laws of nature at will, & ascended bodily into heaven: and 2. of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, & was Punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, & the second by exile or death in furcâ. <!-- in furca? what?
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
