Plato Quotes

Neither a life of anarchy nor one beneath a despot should you praise; to all that lies in the middle a god has given excellence.

Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?

There are no tyrants where there are no slaves.

There is no freedom in peaceful slavery.

Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well look'd upon?

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters.

To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in.

The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude.

There is, in fact, no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.

Freedom can flow from order. That is not to say that freedom always flows from order because you can have a totalitarian order and you can have an undemocratic order from which freedom will not flow, but that surest way to destroy freedom is to have chaos.

In the world of mules there are no rules.

Force works on servile natures, not the free.

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.

All extremes are bad. All that is good and useful, if carried to extremes, may become-and beyond a certain limit is bound to become-bad and injurious.

The master who fears the choices his people will make enough to take those choices away isn't worth serving.

I really have always thought of myself as somebody who lives in the middle of the wheel and is able to go to the extreme, to the outside of the wheel in any direction. The best case scenario for me is to be able to be centered and then go out.

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

There are two kinds of rebellion. The first is one in which the slave demands something that the tyrant has got. The second is one in which he demands something that the tyrant has not got.

A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

If Truth is taken away from us, then Right and Wrong are taken from us as well. If we don't know Right and Wrong, then we can't, we won't control ourselves, but will look to someone else to bring order through brute force and raw power. We will be controlled by a tyrant, and we will no longer be free.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

Those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another.