Quotes from Plato

If you expect to stop denunciation of your wrong way of life by putting people to death, there is something amiss with your reasoning. This way of escape is neither possible nor creditable; the best and easiest way is not to stop the mouths of others, but to make yourselves as well behaved as possible. This is my last message to you who voted for my condemnation.

A MAN WHO HAS GIVEN HIS HEART TO LEARNING AND TRUE WISDOM AND EXERCISED THAT PART OF HIMSELF IS SURELY BOUND, IF HE ATTAINS TO TRUTH, TO HAVE IMMORTAL AND DIVINE THOUGHTS, AND CANNOT FAIL TO ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY AS FULL AS IS PERMITTED TO HUMAN NATURE; AND BECAUSE HE HAS ALWAYS LOOKED AFTER THE DIVINE ELEMENT IN HIMSELF AND KEPT HIS GUARDIAN SPIRIT IN GOOD ORDER HE MUST BE HAPPY ABOVE ALL MEN

The first of the two loves has a noble purpose, and delights only in the intelligent nature of man, and is faithful to the end, and has no shadow of wantonness or lust. The second is the coarser kind of love, which is a love of the body rather than of the soul, and is of women and boys as well as of men.

Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him. That

Nay, Socrates, said Glaucon, the measure of listening to such discussions is the whole of life for reasonable men. The Republic, 450c.

Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery, both for private man and city.

Philosophy starts nowhere else but with wondering.

The punishment we suffer, if we refuse to take an interest in matters of government, is to live under the government of worse men.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither Christianity, nor any other form of religion and society, has hitherto been able to cope with this most difficult of social problems, and that the side from which Plato regarded it is that from which we turn away. Population is the most untameable force in the political and social world.

For the fact is that neither the grammarian nor any other person of skill ever makes a mistake in so far as he is what his name implies; they none of them err unless their skill fails them, and then they cease to be skilled artists. No artist or sage or ruler errs at the time when he is what his name implies; though he is commonly said to err.

whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is just:

Be of good cheer, then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only

But to Plato in his present mood of mind the family is only a disturbing influence which, instead of filling up, tends to disarrange the higher unity of the State. No organization is needed except a political, which, regarded from another point of view, is a military one.

If a person does not attend to the meaning of terms as they are commonly used in argument, he may be involved even in greater paradoxes

wherever the argument, like a wind, tends, thither must we go.

whenever there are any taxes, the one who's just pays more tax on an equal amount of property, the other less, and whenever [343E] there are allotments, the former gains nothing, the latter a lot.

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, espe- cially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

It is by justice, that we can truly authenticate a man's value or nullity, the absence of justice, is the absence of what makes him man. Plato

Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods. I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are quite unfit to be repeated.

for the man of war must learn the art of number or he will not know how to array his troops, and the philosopher also, because he has to rise out of the sea of change and lay hold of true being, and therefore he must be an arithmetician.

Well, Socrates, it's by no means uncommon for people to say what is not correct.

Then, I said, Thrasymachus, there is no one in any rule who, in so far as he is a ruler, considers or enjoins what is for his own interest, but always what is for the interest of his subject or suitable to his art; to that he looks, and that alone he considers in everything which he says and does.

Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.