Daily Inspiration Quote by Cicero

Cicero isn’t admiring passion here; he’s demoting it to a second-string substitute you send onto the field when the real players - judgment, prudence, persuasion - have already failed. The line carries the cool confidence of a statesman-philosopher who watched the Roman Republic get eaten alive by theatrics, vendettas, and men who could turn a crowd’s feelings into a weapon. In that world, “passion” isn’t authenticity. It’s a tell: the visible flaring-up of someone who can’t win on the merits.

The phrasing is surgical. “Employs” treats emotion like a tool, not a spontaneous overflow. Cicero implies that the passionate person is not swept away but strategically reaching for heat when light won’t do. That’s an indictment of demagogues and litigants alike: if you can’t reason, you perform. If you can’t persuade, you provoke. Passion becomes a kind of rhetorical arson - effective at drawing attention, disastrous for building anything durable.

Under the sentence sits Cicero’s larger project: making civic life depend on logos rather than force, impulse, or faction. He’s staking a moral hierarchy with political consequences. Reason is the currency of the republic; passion is what you spend when you’re broke.

It also reads like self-defense. Cicero made his career on argument, not armies. When the late Republic rewarded spectacle and violence, elevating reason wasn’t just philosophy; it was a claim to legitimacy, a last attempt to shame Rome back into being governable.