215 Quotes by Thucydides

The whole of Hellas used once to carry arms, their habitations being unprotected and their communication with each other unsafe; indeed, to wear arms was as much a part of everyday life with them as with the barbarians.

The cause of all this was the pursuit of power driven by greed and ambition, leading in turn to the passions of the party rivalries thus established. The dominant men on each side in the various cities employed fine-sounding terms, claiming espousal either of democratic rights for all or of a conservative aristocracy, but the public whose interests they professed to serve were in fact their ultimate prize.

The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.

Now the only sure basis of an alliance is for each party to be equally afraid of the other.

Friendship or enmity is everywhere an affair of time and circumstance.

People get into the habit of entrusting the things they desire to wishful thinking, and subjecting things they don’t desire to exhaustive thinking.

One’s sense of honor is the only thing that does not grow old, and the last pleasure, when one is worn out with age, is not, as the poet said, making money, but having the respect of one’s fellow men.

The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them: We have to abide their outcome in the dark.

The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever.