Plato Quotes - Page 15

• If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.

  George Steiner

  Dream, Art, Laughter

  George Steiner (1998). “Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman”, p.392, Yale University Press

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• People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

  David Stove

  Religious, Powerful, Fall

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• The atomists , unlike Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle , sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.

  Bertrand Russell

  Finals, Purpose, World

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.64, Routledge

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• One can't help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman- whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge- is fundamentally and always interested in clothes.

  Jean Webster

  Baby, Husband, Men

  Jean Webster (2002). “Daddy-Long-Legs”, p.97, Courier Corporation

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• While [Plato] affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.

  John Dewey

  Fall, Small Numbers, Class

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.68, 谷月社

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• But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.

  John Dewey

  Mean, Taught Us, Class

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.87, Courier Corporation

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• The breakdown of Plato's philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.

  John Dewey

  Philosophy, Would Be, Facts

  "Democracy and Education". Book by John Dewey, 1916.

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• Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

  Allan Bloom

  Philosophy, Influence, Results

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 286, 1990.

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• The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

  William Blake

  Writing, Men, Sublime

  William Blake, W. H. Stevenson (2007). “Blake: The Complete Poems”, p.501, Pearson Education

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• To saya man is fallen in love,or that he is deeply in love,or up to the ears in love,and sometimes even over head and ears in it,carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,I hold to be damnable and heretical:and so much for that. Let love therefore be what it will,my uncleToby fell into it.

  Laurence Sterne

  Love Is, Men, Ears

  'Tristram Shandy' (1759-67) bk. 6, ch. 37

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• Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.

  Plutarch

  Rivers, Gold, Jupiter

  Plutarch, John Dryden (1859). “Plutarch's lives”, p.59

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• If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord's word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah's testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah's fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts.

  Albert J. Nock

  Strong, Character, Support

  "Isaiah's Job". The Atlantic Monthly, June 1936.

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• Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Men, Understanding Nature, Views

  "Writings on Physics and Philosophy" by Wolfgang Pauli, (p. 142), 1994.

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• As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Compassion, Self, Melancholy

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• Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.

  Richard Rorty

  Christian, Ideas, Selling

  Richard Rorty (1999). “Philosophy and Social Hope”, ePenguin

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• Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Emotional, Issues, Intellectual

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• The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Mass Culture, People, Kitchen

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.67, Routledge

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• Too many christians have been chargeable with... confounding the Logos of Plato with that of John , and making of it a second person in the trinity, than which no two things can be more different.

  Joseph Priestley

  Christian, Two, Different

  Joseph Priestley (1782). “An History of the Corruption of Christianity”, p.462

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• Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

  Alain Badiou

  Philosophical, Order, Medicine

  "Plato, Our Dear Plato!". Magazine littéraire, no. 447, November 2005.

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• Plato has dramatic strength ... but is quite unaware of the strength of the argument against his position ... and allows himself to be grossly unfair in arguing against it.

  Bertrand Russell

  Arguing, Argument, Dramatic

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• In spreading his ideas, Plato was willing to employ emotional appeals, state propaganda, and the use of force.

  Bertrand Russell

  Emotional, Ideas, Use

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• It is true, indeed, that the account Plato gives in 'Timaeus' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teachings.'

  Aristotle

  Teaching, Giving, Different

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• Aristotle was by far a less able thinker than Plato ... he was completely overwhelmed by Plato.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Able, Overwhelmed, Thinker

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• During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Years, Ideas, Littles

  "Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction". Book by Ludwig von Mises, 1952.

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• The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind.

  Edward Gibbon

  History, Secret, Ignorant

  Edward Gibbon, Henry Hart Milman (1854). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.449

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