Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.

Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.

The common people feel themselves oppressed by the grasping of some, and their vanity is flattered by others. Fired with evil passions, they are no longer willing to submit to control, but demand that everything be subject to their authority. The invariable result is that government assumes the noble names of free and popular, but becomes in fact the most execrable thing, mob rule.

If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

For peace, with justice and honor, is the fairest and most profitable of possessions, but with disgrace and shameful cowardice, it is the most infamous and harmful of all.