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Vilest of all living men! Shut out from your right of
speech, not by barriers or doors which any man might break open, but by so many
heavy penalties, which are registered in the temple of the Goddess, you are
trying to force your way in and to approach those precincts from which the laws
exclude you. Debarred by every right that holds good in Athens, by the decisions of three
tribunals, by the registers of the archons and of the collectors of taxes, by
the indictment for wrongful entry in which you yourself are the plaintiff,
curbed, I might almost say, by chains of steel, you wriggle and force your way
through all and imagine that by weaving excuses and trumping up false charges
you can overturn all the principles of justice.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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