A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered, "In silence." - Plutarch

Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as ‘I should not have thought of it.'"

[It was] better to set up a monarchy themselves than to suffer a sedition to continue that must certainly end in one.

Cæsar is said to have been admirably fitted by nature to make a great statesman and orator, and to have taken such pains to improve his genius this way, that without dispute he might challenge the second place. More he did not aim at, as choosing to be first rather amongst men of arms and power, and, therefore, never rose to that height of eloquence to which nature would have carried him, his attention being diverted to those expeditions and designs, which at length gained him the empire. And he himself, in his answer to Cicero’s panegyric on Cato, desires his reader not to compare the plain discourse of a soldier with the harangues of an orator who had not only fine parts, but had employed his life in this study.