I am not blaming those who are resolved to rule, only those who show an even greater readiness to submit.

Few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought.

The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.

For the love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion of the stronger, and the possession of capital enabled the more powerful to reduce the smaller cities to subjection.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils.

It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.

For men can endure to hear others praised only so long as they can severally persuade themselves of their own ability to equal the actions recounted: when this point is passed, envy comes in and with it incredulity.