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.
Demosthenes: “For I have been taught both by hearsay and experience, that most of your advantages have escaped you, from unwillingness…”
Editor's note · Context
Addressing the Athenian assembly, he attributes past failures to a lack of civic duty rather than a lack of understanding.
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They say that you should keep quiet, though you are injured; but they can not themselves keep quiet among you, though no one injures them.
Because our city is the only one where liberty is allowed to speak for the enemy, where a man taking a bribe may safely address the people, though they have been deprived of their possessions.
For this reason he will show us no mercy, if he get us into his power: and therefore you must make up your minds, that the struggle will be one for life and death.
He is convinced, you will not submit to be slaves; if you were inclined, you would not know how, having been accustomed to command: you will be able, should occasion offer, to give him more trouble than any people in the world.





