History of the Peloponnesian War

"It is but fair, too, that you should sustain the dignity of the state derived from its sovereignty, on which you all pride yourselves; and that either you should not shrink from its labours, or else should lay no claim to its honours either. Nor should you suppose that you are struggling to escape one evil only, slavery instead of freedom; but to avoid loss of dominion also, and danger from the animosities which you lave incurred in your exercise of that dominion.

And from this it is no longer possible for you to retire; if through fear at the present time any one is for so playing the honest man in quiet. For you now hold it as a tyranny, which it seems wrong to have assumed, but dangerous to give up.

And men with these views would very quickly ruin the state, whether they persuaded others [to adopt the same], or even lived any where independently by themselves; for quietness is not a safe principle, unless ranged with activity; nor is it for the interest of a sovereign state, but of a subject one, that it may live in safe slavery.