We secure our friends not by accepting favours but by doing them.

For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.

There is no need to suppose that human beings differ very much one from another; but it is true that the ones who come out on top are the ones who have been trained in the hardest school.

An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful.

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.

In generosity we are equally singular, acquiring our friends by conferring, not by receiving, favours.

Mankind apparently find it easier to drive away adversity than to retain prosperity.