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That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

"I think he needs help." "It's hard to help those who don't want to help themselves." "Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others," Elsa objects.

But a confederacy of different republics has, in many instances, existed and flourished for a long time together. The celebrated Helvetian league, which exists at this moment in full vigor, and with unimpaired strength, while its origin may be traced to the confines of antiquity, is one among many examples in this head... (Anti-Federalist 18-20)

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry.

the Achaean league [had] considerable likeness... The Lycian Confederacy [a] greater analogy... Yet history does not inform us that either of them ever degenerated, or tended to degenerate, into one consolidated government. On the contrary, we know that the ruin of one of them proceeded from the incapacity of the federal authority to prevent the dissensions, and finally the disunion, of the subordinate authorities.

Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.

History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

The question that's asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it's born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul. Or, let's say: the enigma of Iago.

Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? - The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time will change the world.

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated- nearly- into air, and become, in a true sense, exalted.

I don't know anything. -Should God be proud or humble, majestic or simple, yielding or in-? What kind of idea is he? What kind am I?

"The enclosed, boiling circumstances of his captivity, at once intimate and distant, made Saladin Chamcha want to argue with the woman, unbendingness can also be monomania, he wanted to say, it can be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last."

nearing halfway point...

"So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by cliches..." pg. 270

Switching to Bloom's translation for the Republic

only 1100 to go...