Aristotle Quotes
The brave man, if he be compared with the coward, seems foolhardy; and, if with the foolhardy man, seems a coward.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross, Clarendon Press, 1908, p. 1108b.
Sometimes paraphrased as “the coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave man dies but once.”
In general, Jefferson thought Blacks at that stage of their development inferior to whites but as this quotation shows he also thought them superior in certain traits. He also stated that their memories were superior to that of whites, but this observation we know now is not, like any of the others, a racial characteristic but is common in all oral cultures where human memory is the only way of preserving history, literature, procedures and much culture.
Aristotle (/ærɪˈstɒtəl/; Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotélēs, pronounced [aristotélɛːs]; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion.
