“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Many quotes are sometimes wrongly attributed to Cicero.
But, in fact, they come from a novel about Cicero by Taylor Caldwell,
and are not found in any of Cicero’s actual writings.
This particular quote is found in the novel by Taylor Caldwell
based on the life of Cicero, “A Pillar of Iron” (1965),
p. 661 in Open Road Media; Reprint edition (September 26, 2017).
This passage is also quoted in a speech given by Florida Governor and State Supreme Court Justice Millar F. Caldwell in 1965.
The paraphrase may ultimately be from the Second Catiline Oration
but drastically changes the rhetoric.
Actual example from Second Catiline Oration:
“But why are we speaking so long about one enemy;
and about that enemy who now avows that he is one;
and whom I now do not fear, because, as I have always wished,
a wall is between us; and are saying nothing about those who dissemble,
who remain at Rome, who are among us?”