Demosthenes: “Plunder of the treasury should be prevented by devising a plan for its safe custody, not by abandoning our interests.”

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.

If we admitted the truth of what would be your best possible answer, namely, that all you do is for honor and renown, I wonder what puts it into your head, that you ought from such motives to exert yourself and undergo toil and danger…

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.

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.