Cowards fear to die; but courage stout, Rather than live in snuff, will be put out. - Walter Raleigh

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty. The reason thereof is, that as nature hath laid before men the chief of all fortunes, so she disposes them rather to rapine than honest industry, and more subject to bad than good endeavours : hereof it cometh, that one man eateth another, and he that is weakest must always go to the worst.

All histories do shew, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.

It is the nature of men, having escaped one extreme, which by force they were constrained long to endure, to run headlong into the other extreme, forgetting that virtue doth always consist in the mean.