A woman is only a lesser man.
~ Plato, in The Republic, bk. 5, 455e
Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it.
Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one city of the poor, the other of the rich; they are at war with one another, and in either they are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if you treat them as a single state.
~ Plato, in The Republic, Bk. 4, 423.
Every man has had kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks, among his ancestors.
~ Plato, in Theaetetus, 155
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust.
~ Plato, in The Laws, Bk. 1, 636
Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victim of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.
~ Socrates, in Plato’s The Republic, Bk. 1, 334c.
Shall we carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we shall wish them to have when they are grown up?
~ Socrates, in Plato’s Republic
The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.
~ Socrates, in Plato’s Apology
Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
All European philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.
~ Alfred North Whitehead