Sublime
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I suppose you mean, as I infer from your indictment, that I teach them not to acknowledge the gods which the state acknowledges, but some other new divinities or spiritual agencies in their stead. These are the lessons by which I corrupt the youth, as you say. Yes, that I say emphatically.
Plato • Plato: The Complete Works
The philosophy of friendship goes further back, to Aristotle. “Without friends no one would choose to live,” he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, “though he had all other goods.”
In the Athens of 594 B.C., according to Plutarch, “the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances… seemed possible but despotic power.”35 The poor, finding their status worsened with each year—the government in
... See moreWill Durant • The Lessons of History
Many men dreamed at last of establishing above the cities a sort of sovereign power, which should look to the maintenance of order, and compel those turbulent little societies to live in peace. It was thus that Phocion, a good citizen, advised his compatriots m accept the authority of Philip, and promised them, at this price, concord and security.
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges • The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Illustrated)
The laws which have been hitherto mentioned, i.e. the laws of nature, do bind men absolutely, even as they are men, although they have never any settled fellowship, never any solemn agreement amongst themselves what to do, or not to do: but forasmuch as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things, needful
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Athenian individuals do not judge the advice based on the state’s gain but on the hypothetical gain of the speaker.
Edward Teach • Sadly, Porn
Apology
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Thrasymachus—not right is the interest of the stronger, but right is the necessity of the weaker.