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The Republic quotes
10 quotes from The Republic by Plato (trans. Benjamin Jowett). Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #55201 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
*338C* Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.
Now the cave or den is the world of sight, the fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way to knowledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea of good is last seen and with difficulty, but when seen is inferred to be the author of good and right--parent of the lord of light in this world, and of truth and understanding in the other.
*514A* And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and *514B* can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.
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?
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform,--that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image.
So let the unjust make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he means to be great in his injustice: (he who is found out is nobody:) for the highest reach of injustice is, to be deemed just when you are not.
But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. *365C* Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.