"Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire … Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go."

“Trees, though they are cut and lopped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again.”

“Hatred and unpopularity at the moment have fallen to the lot of all who have aspired to rule others; but where odium must be incurred, true wisdom incurs it for the highest objects. Hatred also is short-lived; but that which makes the splendour of the present and the glory of the future remains for ever unforgotten. Make your decision, therefore, for glory then and honour now, and attain both objects by instant and zealous effort: do not send heralds to Lacedaemon, and do not betray any sign of being oppressed by your present sufferings, since they whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities.”

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”

“We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”

“But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.”

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves”