Ancient Quote by Thomas Hobbes

That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely…

— Ben Jonson

Envy honors the dead in order to insult the living.

— Claude Adrien Helvetius

Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure…

— William Hazlitt

In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at…

— Thomas B. Macaulay

“Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times—letting pass infinite other examples—a fragment of an ancient statue has been…

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong…

— Anita Diamant

The maxim that men are not to be praised before their death was invented by envy and too lightly adopted by philosophers.

— Luc de Clapiers

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their…

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

To be an object of hatred and aversion to their contemporaries has been the usual fate of all those whose merit has raised them…

— Thucydides

“Death did this to people: making cowards, scapegoats, preachers and mourners of the living; while the dead – ignoble or not – became objects…

— Meghna Pant

The jealousy of the dead is lasting!

— Jean Garrigue

Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances…

— Madame de Stael