The Laws of Plato

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.

there is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offences, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing.

If justice is a healthy state of the soul, then injustice is a disease of the soul in need of curing via punishment... I maintain that it would be better by far that good men start off life in prison, and work their way towards freedom. Good men, maintained as those who are able to control themselves, will not find this a burden, but a reward of virtue. Bad men will only find harm done to them, as they can not rule themselves.

Human beliefs about the gods have changed, and laws should change with them.

Education certainly gives victory, although victory sometimes produces forgetfulness of education; for many have grown insolent from victory in war, and this insolence has engendered in them innumerable evils; and many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors; but education is never suicidal.

... because if a human institution gets off to a good and careful start, there is a sort of divine guarantee that it will prosper.

in a family there may be several brothers, and the bad may be a majority; and when the bad majority conquer the good minority, the family are worse than themselves.

Self-love is the source of that ignorant conceit of knowledge which is always doing and never succeeding.

Moreover, in fits of anger, in fears, in the disturbances that come over souls in bad fortune and the release from such things that comes with good fortune, in the experiences brought by diseases and wars and poverty, and the experiences brought upon human beings by the opposite circumstances — in all such situations what is noble and what is ignoble in each case must be taught and defined.

repetitions. The Greek is in places very ungrammatical and intractable.

He who has the divine has the human added to him; but he who has lost the greater is deprived of both. The lesser goods are health, beauty, strength, and, lastly, wealth; not the blind God, Pluto, but one who has eyes to see and follow wisdom. For mind or wisdom is the most divine of all goods; and next comes temperance, and justice springs from the union of wisdom and temperance with courage, which is the fourth or last. These four precede other goods, and the legislator will arrange all his ordinances accordingly, the human going back to the divine, and the divine to their leader mind.

My first observation is, that your lawgiver ordered you to endure hardships, because he thought that those who had not this discipline would run away from those who had. But he ought to have considered further, that those who had never learned to resist pleasure would be equally at the mercy of those who had, and these are often among the worst of mankind. Pleasure, like fear, would overcome them and take away their courage and freedom.

And we must remember further that we are speaking of the education, not of a trainer, or of the captain of a ship, but of a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and how to obey; and such an education aims at virtue, and not at wealth or strength or mere cleverness. To the good man, education is of all things the most precious, and is also in constant need of renovation. 'We agree.' And we have before agreed that good men are those who are able to control themselves, and bad men are those who are not. Let me offer you an illustration which will assist our argument. Man is one; but in one and the same man are two foolish counsellors who contend within him—pleasure and pain, and of either he has expectations which we call hope and fear; and he is able to reason about good and evil, and reason, when affirmed by the state, becomes law.

A mere speck that nevertheless constantly contributed to the good of the whole--is you, you who have forgotten that nothing is created except to provide the entire universe with a life of prosperity. You forget that creation is not for your benefit: you exist for the sake of the universe.

The fairest music is that which delights the best and best educated.

anarchy should have no place in the life of man or of the beasts who are subject to man.