Controversial Sayings

We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character.

We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the nat…

For no country has ever yet been found that has proved equal to Athens in the hour of trial; and if our empire shall be overthrown, and we go down to defeat, our fall will be more glorious than that of any other state, for we shall have left to all a…

For what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe.

Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to acquire it, but it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

For you are angry with me, who have no hand in the matter, and with yourselves too, if I may say so, for assenting to my counsels and sharing in my errors.

I am of the opinion that the individual who takes no part in public affairs is not to be regarded as a harmless, but as a useless character.

If you want to be wrong then follow the masses.

Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

When a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the libert…

But those who obey the rulers it reviles as willing slaves and men of naught, but it commends and honors in public and private rulers who resemble subjects and subjects who are like rulers. Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of libe…

And so the probable outcome of too much freedom is only too much slavery in the individual and the state. Probably, then, tyranny develops out of no other constitution than democracy—from the height of liberty, I take it, the fiercest extreme of serv…

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do.

This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.

I am very conscious that I am not wise at all.

If anyone says that he has learned anything from me... be assured that he is not telling the truth.