The Republic Quotes

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

“Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

“Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.”

“There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.”

“Magic consists of, and is acquired by the worship of the gods.”

“The wisdom which knows what are and are not dangers is opposed to the ignorance of them”

“You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way.”

“Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?”

“The beginning in every task is the chief thing. • variant: The beginning is the most important part of any work. (Jowett translation)”

“to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.”

“My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them.”

“As you hope to prove your own great value to the state, and having proved it, to attain at once to absolute power, so do I indulge a hope that I shall be the supreme power over you, if I am able to prove my own great value to you.”

“[Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato….  He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, "Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.”

“Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish.”

“Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.”

“The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.”

“Philosophy is the acquisition of knowledge.”

“We need to use every argument we can to fight against anyone who does away with knowledge, understanding and intelligence but at the same time asserts anything at all about anything.”

“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity—I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.”

“Whatever is always in motion is immortal.”

“By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.”

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”

“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”

“But when I describe something and you describe another thing, or I say something and you say nothing - Is there any contradiction? How can he who speaks contradict him who speaks not.”

“Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.”

“Each of these private teachers who work for pay … inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.”