"The Romans conquered the world through seriousness, discipline, organisation, continuity of vision and method; through the conviction that they were a superior race, born to command; through the well-considered, methodically calculated use of the most ruthless cruelty, cold perfidy and the most hypocritical propaganda, employed simultaneously or in turn; by an unshakeable resolution to always sacrifice everything to prestige, without ever being sensitive either to peril, or to pity, or to any human respect; by the art of decomposing under terror the very soul of their adversaries, or of putting them to sleep with hope, before enslaving them with arms; finally by such skilful handling of the crudest lie that they have deceived even posterity and are still deceiving us. "
Simone Weil, in "Some reflections on the origins of Hitlerism". @history