Cicero: “But if, on the other hand, the assertion is made that pleasure admits of a show of expediency also, there can still be…”

In the matter of a promise one must always consider the meaning and not the mere words.

For they secure one sort of justice, to be sure, in that they do no positive wrong to anyone, but they fall into the opposite injustice; for hampered by their pursuit of learning they leave to their fate those whom they ought to defend.

Further than this, who fails to see that those promises are not binding which are extorted by intimidation or which we make when misled by false pretences?

But the trouble about this matter is that it is in the greatest souls and in the most brilliant geniuses that we usually find ambitions for civil and military authority, for power, and for glory, springing up; and therefore we must be the…