Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead
Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.
Interpretation
Silence can imply ambiguity and does not clarify one's position.
This quote by Cicero suggests that while silence may not directly indicate agreement or confession, it equally does not serve as a clear rejection of an idea or accusation. It highlights the complexity of communication and the significance of what remains unsaid, pointing to the nuances in human interaction where silence carries weight.
In practice
During a debate, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of silence in communication.
Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.
Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defence can actually be just.
Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.
Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.
No one has the right to be sorry for himself for a misfortune that strikes everyone.
Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.
Mind is the absence of meditation. The moment meditation arises in you, mind is found nowhere.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.
What to the Slave is the 4th of July.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.
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