Explore "Discourses on Livy" by Niccolò Machiavelli on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
That changes in sects and tongues, and the happening of floods and pestilences, obliterate the memory of the past.
To those philosophers who will have it that the world has existed from all eternity, it were, I think, a good answer, that if what they say be true we ought to have record of a longer period than five thousand years; did it not appear that the memory of past times is blotted out by a variety of causes, some referable to men, and some to Heaven.