O tempora, o mores!

In this passage, Cicero uses it as an expression of his disgust, to deplore the sorry condition of the Roman Republic, in which a citizen could plot against the state and not be punished in his view adequately for it.

immo vero etiam in Senatum venit, fit publici consili particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum!

Indeed, he even comes into the Senate, he takes part in public debate, he notes and marks out with his eyes each one of us for slaughter!Cicero is frustrated that, despite all of the evidence that has been compiled against Catiline, who had been conspiring to overthrow the Roman government and assassinate Cicero himself, and in spite of the fact that the Senate had given its senatus consultum ultimum, Catiline had not yet been executed.

Cicero goes on to describe various times throughout Roman history where consuls saw fit to execute conspirators with less evidence, in one instance—the case of former consul Lucius Opimius' slaughter of Gaius Gracchus (one of the Gracchi brothers)—based only on quasdam seditionum suspiciones: "mere suspicion of disaffection".

You will see eyes burning at the same time with cruelty and arrogance!Martial's poem "To Caecilianus" (Epigrams §9.70) also makes reference to the First Catilinarian Oration:[7] dixerat 'o mores!

was of old the cry of Tullius, when Catiline was contriving his impious plotIn modern times this exclamation is still used to criticize present-day attitudes and trends, but sometimes is used humorously or wryly.

It was used as the title of an epigram on Joseph Justus Scaliger by the Welsh epigrammatist John Owen, in his popular Epigrammata, 1613 Lib.

:[8] Translated by Harvey, 1677, as:[9] Even in the eighteenth century it began being used this way: an aquatint print of 1787 by Samuel Alken after Thomas Rowlandson in the British Royal Collection entitled O Tempora, O Mores!

The expression is used in both the play (1955) and movie (1960) Inherit the Wind, a fictional account of the Scopes Trial, in which it is uttered by the cynical reporter, Hornbeck, referring to the town's attitude towards Darwin's theory of evolution.

[13] In his version of the speech, which followed the translation of Charles Duke Yonge,[2] senator Cruz rendered the phrase O tempora!