Demosthenes

For you said that you held the city’s salt as of more importance than the table of your foreign host.

How outrageous that when a man whose business it is to act the parts of a Carion or of a Xanthias showed himself so noble and generous, Aeschines, the counsellor of the greatest city, the adviser of the Ten Thousand of Arcadia, did not restrain his insolence, but in drunken heat, when Xenodocus, one of the picked corps of Philip, was entertaining us, seized a captive woman by the hair, and took a …

The peace conceded to him at that time was due to the causes I have named, and not, as Aeschines maliciously insists, to me;

I at once called upon you, and told the envoys, to sail for the Hellespont as speedily as possible, and not to abandon, or allow Philip to seize and hold, any of the positions there in the meantime;

Demosthenes in his speech on the liberty of the Rhodians says, all nations ought to guard against forming such leagues, as approaching too near to servitude.

—when my suit was due to come on in three or four days, Meidias and his brother suddenly burst into my house and challenged me to take over their trierarchy.

For I shall never be shown to have been one of the friends of Harpalus, and among the decrees that were passed concerning him only those proposed by me have afforded the State a clean record.

The people accused you, Demosthenes, of having accepted twenty talents illegally, against the interests of the state.

Assuring him that the reduction of the Aetolians was easy, they urged him to go as quickly as possible against their villages, and not wait till the whole people should unite and oppose him, but to endeavour successively to make himself master of each village before him.

Now there are some who think they confute a speaker the moment they ask, What then ought we to do?

Again, men of Athens, when I saw that Neoptolemus, the actor, enjoying safe conduct under cover of his profession, was doing his best to injure our city and was Philip’s agent and representative at Athens, I once more came forward and addressed you, not out of private animosity or love of informing, as indeed my subsequent conduct has proved.

Demosthenes in oratione de libertate Rhodiorum:

And so Aeschines inveighs against Demosthenes because he sacrificed victims on the seventh day after his daughter's death.

Well then, said I, as to this I will give up to you for examination by torture the slave who has the copy of your challenge to me.

If anyone interrupts me with a question, And where, pray, are such things likely to happen?

When, therefore, I have dared to bring impeachment against Timarchus for having prostituted himself, in order that I may deprive him of the right to address the people in assembly, Demosthenes says that the very act complained of calls, not for an accuser’ s arraignment, but for the testimony of the tax-gatherer who collected this tax from Timarchus.

But when I had loosed it and gone through it all point by point, I was moved to laughter—partly from pleasure at hearing nothing alarming, and partly because I was judging your case against that of Demosthenes.

for "what each man wishes, that also he thinks," according to the Athenian orator.

" But also, when Demosthenes had said, "To all of us death is owed," and the rest, Phanocles in his Loves, or Beautiful Ones, writes, "But the thread of the Fates is not to be undone, nor can any of us who feed upon the earth ever flee it.

Come forward, Demosthenes.

But Onetor, when I made this challenge to him, and all those present declared that my proposal was just, refused to have recourse to this certain test, but, as though there were other and surer proofs regarding such matters than torture and testimony, he produced no witnesses to prove that he had paid the dowry, nor would he give up for torture the female slaves who knew the fact, to prove that hi …

Not to detain you longer, I say that we must be prepared for war, and must urge the Greek states, by our action rather than by our appeals, to join our alliance;

It has been before now remarked, men of Athens, by some speaker—not one of the great body of citizens, but one of those who are likely to have a fit if these reforms are carried out— What good have we ever got from the speeches of Demosthenes?

Of the orators, who does not know the best—that Demosthenes surpassed all the orators in power of delivery and cleverness of thought and abundance of words, and Lysias in brevity and simplicity and continuity of thought and in concealing his cleverness?

Demosthenes declared himself to be his nephew, but renounced his claim when he was unmasked by my clients.

Who can suppose that the poems of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, or the orations of Demosthenes, Cicero, and Burke, would ever have seen the light, had not Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Demosthenes, Cicero and Burke themselves existed?