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If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.
--
Plutarch, Moralia, 74C

 

Diogenes of Sinope

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Worse than thieves, murderers, or cannibals, those who offer compromise slow you and sap your vitality while pretending to be your friends. They are not your friends. Compromisers are the enemies of all humanity, the enemies of life itself. Compromisers are the enemies of everything important, sacred, and true.

 

L. Neil Smith

 

I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my god-damned friends, White, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor nights!

 

Warren G. Harding

 

We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.

 

Pythagoras

 

Epops: Yet, certainly, the wise learn many things from their enemies; for caution preserves all things. From a friend you could not learn this, but your foe immediately obliges you to learn it. For example, the states have learned from enemies, and not from friends, to build lofty walls, and to possess ships of war. And this lesson preserves children, house, and possessions.
Chorus [leader]: It is useful, as it appears to me, to hear their arguments first; for one might learn some wisdom even from one's foes.
(tr. Hickie 1853, vol. 1, p. 322; l. 375 identical in SEA 1838, p. 236, and in Bartlett 1968, p. 91 or Archive.org)

 

Aristophanes

 

There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.

 

Adam Smith