Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes
It might be pardonable to refuse to defend some men, but to defend them negligently is nothing short of criminal.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Cicero: The Verrine Orations, Volume I. Translated by L. H. G. Greenwood, Harvard University Press, 1928, p. 57.
When she wrote her letter to the editor the Veterans administration sized her computer and accused her of sedition which is not a crime under American law. After complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union, the VA then did not file charges but had intimidated her.
Nathaniel Gordon was the first American slave trader to be executed after the slave trade was made illegal. The Erie was his slave ship where, as was typical, many of the captured Blacks, died as a result of the inhuman conditions. Although Gordon was the first person executed in America, the act making the slave trade an act of piracy dated from 1820. See {68753} .
The newly developed M-16 rifle was resisted by the army brass who did not want to give up their old WWII weapons. There was even cases of army sabatoge of tests to avoid changing weapons. Ironically 40 years later, when the M-16 had been technologically eclipsed by the Russians who had twice the firepower rate and the Israelis who developed a more accurate weapon both more reliable, the army did not want to abandon the M-16 and its shortened version M-4.
She converted to the Catholic Religion and the monarch had to be a Protestant.
U-Tube (Google) was faced with a very difficult decision when a Coptic Christian Islamaphobe produced and posted “Innocence of Muslims” a hateful video intended to inflame and insult Muslims. Despite the terrible content, U-Tube determined that the film did not violate their free speech standards and would not be censored. However, there were violent riots and demonstrations in reaction in a number of Muslim nations. People were being killed. So U-Tube decided to block the video in Egypt, Libya, Indonesia, and India (not a majority Muslim nation but had over 200 million Muslims). Galperin and others however made this important moral point. In essence to avoid unreasonable, and immoral violence, we censor materials and allow the perpetrators of violence to also force Americans to abandon the value of freedom of speech and freedom to read. There is a RIGHT to insult someone or their religion or their God. There is a right for all to, if they wish, view a video regardless of how hateful it is. There is NO moral responsibility for violence for ever publishing ANYTHING. The insulted person who resorts to violence is morally responsible and NO ONE ELSE. However some argue that, from a more fundamentalist point of view, the Muslim Holy Book REQUIRES blasphemers to be put to death. But, and often forgotten, the Jewish and Christian Old Testament requires the SAME death penalty for Blasphemy. So modernists insist that to follow holy books literally can often be immoral, and proper morality requires the ignoring of the “word of God”. It is a difficult question and while one can argue for or against the U-Tube Google decision, but taking either side of this question is reasonable and we all do the best we can with a ethically terribly difficult problem.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher, who served as consul in the year 63 BC. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.
