Lance McMurchy

“In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome.”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

“The journey was thrilling. Inspiring. Exalting. And, in the end, it did not change a thing. “You would never have believed me if I’d told you,” said Sheikh al-Khammas. “You had to learn the truth for yourself: the real Holy City is within.”
― Michael Golding, A Poet of the Invisible World

“As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.”
― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery

“Caesar quoted in Greek two words from the Athenian comic playwright Menander: literally, in a phrase borrowed from gambling, ‘Let the dice be thrown.’ Despite the usual English translation – ‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty, a sense that everything now was in the lap of the gods. Let’s throw the dice in the air and see where they will fall! Who knows what will happen next?”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome