Tom Holland Quotes

That there existed no earthly empire so great or overweening that it might not one day be dashed to pieces

Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.

I'm literally tone-deaf with singing. It's unreal.

[T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition.

Always been, and the safety of the Republic would be assured. This was a presumption buried deep in the soul of every Roman.

When you encounter the unbelievers, blows to necks it shall be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.

I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.

The most important thing, in anything you do, is always trying your hardest, because even if you try your hardest and it's not as good as you'd hoped, you still have that sense of not letting yourself down.

Winners are the favourites of heaven.

We always want what we're not allowed.

This [for opposition leaders to claim royal lineage], in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean.

More people worship the rising than the setting sun,

Adrenaline has always been my thing.

Spirits flung down from heaven at the beginning of time still stalked the earth, hunting human prey;

It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic's greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Roman's concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist they had won their empire purely in self-defense.

When I was young, my mom realized I could dance and hold a beat, and I really danced just for fun. It was good exercise.

The fish fanciers, sitting by their ponds and gazing into their depths, were tracing shadows darker than they understood.

A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound - as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued - a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it - the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe - that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.

The people the Quran describes have a deep and sophisticated knowledge of the Biblical Tradition.

Here, amid the murk of such contradictory opinions, was ample opportunity for Augustus to consolidate his position yet further. Who better qualified than the Restorer of the Republic, after all, to realise the full potential of hypocrisy?

I completely and utterly rely on my mum. Without my mum, I would not be anywhere at all. I'd literally just be a couch potato.

When Nero, with a casual quip, declared 'mushrooms to be the food of the gods, since it was by means of a mushroom that Claudius has become a god',66 it

I have a photographic memory.

Prohibitions, trust me, only encourage bad behaviour.

Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans.

While he may forget that he is Caesar, I never forget that I am Caesar's daughter.

Even when they have been felled, let alone when they are still standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves,

JULIA: Oldest daughter of Julia and Agrippa. Owner of the smallest dwarf in Rome. Exiled in AD 8.

By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers.

Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks.

The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility's dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity.

When I'm acting, it's like I am the character - no one can talk to me. But I'm not so method I'd sell my house and live on the street to play a tramp.

[T]here [is] no limit to what might not be achieved by an alliance between an imperial monarchy and revelations, if truly believed to be heaven-sent, of a prophet.

Whatever else it may be, the Qur'an is no work of history. Startlingly, were it not for all the commentaries elucidating its mysteries, all the biographies of the Prophet, and all the sprawling collections of hadiths - none of which, in the form we have them, pre-dates the beginning of the third century after the hijra - we would have only the barest reason to associate it with a man named

In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam's origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61

Of all Rome's seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.

You cannot regulate desire.

Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.

Set strictures on a person all you like, but the mind remains adulterous.

Kavad himself, if obliged to fight on a Jewish holy day, had been known to request his adversaries for a temporary truce.

I think, from every actor I've ever spoken to, they say the biggest thing they regret from life is not finishing school.

On stage you need to emphasize every emotion. But on screen you need to tone everything down and make it believable.

Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.