How much better it would be to make friends and win over enemies. Better to serve your country or take care of your own business than to look for ways to hurt someone. Why plot to damage someone's reputation, wealth, or body? You can't succeed without a fight and risk to yourself — even if your target is weaker than you. Even if someone were handed to you in chains, free for you to torture as much as you want, too much violence in striking often dislocates your own joint or catches your tendon in the teeth you've broken.
How much better it would be to win friends, and disarm enemies: to serve the state, or to busy oneself with one’s private affairs, rather than to cast about for what harm you can do to somebody, what wound you can inflict either upon his social position, his fortune, or his person, although you cannot succeed in doing so without a struggle and risk to yourself, even if your antagonist be inferior to you. Even supposing that he were handed over to you in chains, and that you were at liberty to torture him as much as you please, yet even then excessive violence in striking a blow often causes us to dislocate a joint, or entangles a sinew in the teeth which it has broken.