Politics

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Man is by nature a political animal.

They who love in excess also hate in excess.

Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.

the greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over common property only in so far as they are personally affected.

and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.

When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues. The people become a monarch... such people, in its role as a monarch, not being controlled by law, aims at sole power and becomes like a master.

Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.

To seek for utility everywhere is entirely unsuited to men that are great-souled and free.

Now it is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily.

The best man, then, must legislate, and laws must be passed, but these laws will have no authority when they miss the mark, though in all other cases retaining their authority. But when the law cannot determine a point at all, or not well, should the one best man or should all decide? According to our present practice assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and decide, and their judgments an relate to individual cases. Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual.

...it is all wrong that a person who is going to be deemed worthy of the office should himself solicit it... for no one who is not ambitious would ask to hold office.

Inequality is everywhere at the bottom of faction, for in general faction arises from men's striving for what is equal.

The government is everywhere sovereign in the state, and the constitution is in fact the government.

....governments, which have a regard to the common interest, are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.

Man is a political animal. A man who lives alone is either a Beast or a God

Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, whom Homer denounces — the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts.

But to be constantly asking ‘What is the use of it?’ is unbecoming to those of broad vision and unworthy of free men.

Not in depraved things, but in those well oriented according to nature, are we to consider what is natural.

the first principle of all action is leisure.

Again, it is for the sake of the soul that goods external and goods of the body are eligible at all, and all wise men ought to choose them for the sake of the soul, and not the soul for the sake of them.

for nobility is excellence of race.

The deficiencies of nature are what art and education seek to fill up.

But justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.

the use of music for intellectual enjoyment in leisure;

And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.

A straight nose is the most beautiful, but one that deviates from being straight and tends toward being hooked or snub can nevertheless still be beautiful to look at. Yet if it is tightened still more toward the extreme, [25] the part will first be thrown out of due proportion, and in the end it will cease to look like a nose at all, because it has too much of one and too little of the other of these opposites.