Demosthenes: “If you imagine that Chalcidians or Megarians will save Greece, while you run away from the contest, you imagine wrong.”

As for me, never before have I courted favor, by speaking what I am not convinced is for your good, and now I have spoken my whole mind frankly and unreservedly.

For I have been taught both by hearsay and experience, that most of your advantages have escaped you, from unwillingness to do your duty, not from ignorance.

Impossible is it,--impossible, Athenians,--to acquire a solid power by injustice and perjury and falsehood.

Our numerous losses in war may justly be charged to our own negligence; but that they happened not long ago, and that an alliance, to counterbalance them, is open to our acceptance, I must regard as manifestations of divine favor.