Demosthenes: “Good luck is for those who are in a position to avail themselves of it.”

Such is the truth, spoken with perfect freedom, purely from good-will and for the best: not a speech fraught with flattery and mischief and deceit, to earn money for the speaker, and to put the commonwealth into the hands of our enemies.

Yea, among these men, some have risen rapidly from poverty to wealth, from meanness and obscurity to repute and honor, while you, on the contrary, have fallen from honor to obscurity, from wealth to indigence.

You can not surely allege, that Aristodemus ought to be of importance at Athens, and Athens to be of no account among the Greeks.

But I suppose, you inherit a reputation from your father and grandfather, which it were disgraceful in your own person to extinguish, whereas the ancestry of the state was ignoble and mean.