Quotes from Plato

If a person shows that such things as wood, stones, and the like, being many are also one, we admit that he shows the coexistence of the one and many, but he does not show that the many are one or the one many; he is uttering not a paradox but a truism.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

The partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.

The cure of the part should not be attempted without the cure of the whole.

I would fain grow old learning many things.

Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new divinities of his own. Such is the charge.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Will you not allow that I have as much of the spirit of prophecy in me as the swans? For they, when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more lustily than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are going to the god they serve.

To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.

No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

Knowledge is true opinion.

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.

O youth or young man, who fancy that you are neglected by the gods, know that if you become worse, you shall go to worse souls, or if better to the better... In every succession of life and death, you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like. This is the justice of heaven.