Cicero: “For difference of character leads to difference of aims, and the result of such diversity is to estrange friends.”

The first office of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another, unless provoked by wrong; and the next is to lead men to use common possessions for the common interests, private property for their own.

He was wrong; for deceit does not remove the guilt of perjury--it merely aggravates it. #The ancient Roman discipline.# His cunning that impudently tried to masquerade as prudence was, therefore, only folly.

So, then, it is truth that is, as it were, the stuff with which this virtue has to deal and on which it employs itself.

Thus apparent expediency is outweighed when placed in the balance against moral rectitude.