The Hemlock Cup Quotes

“Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, records the moment – and you can hear the emotion in his voice as he does so, a mixture of horror and awe: Then Kleisthenes took into his faction the common people.19”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

“For excess breeds hubris, when great prosperity comes to men of unsound mind.16”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup

“Socrates argued that only God can be a sophist, only God can be truly wise.”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

“In Socrates’ lifetime more than 800 triremes were launched from Athenian-controlled harbours: the largest manned navy the world had ever known.”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

“So at that time of day when the early sun still rings haloes on human heads, Socrates is walking through the Agora to his judgement day.”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

“Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom – whether they are gods or men.
Similarly, those whose own ignorance has made them bad, rotten, evil, do not strive for wisdom either. For no evil or ignorant person ever strives for wisdom. What remains are those who suffer from ignorance, but still retain some sense and understanding. They are conscious of knowing what they don’t know.”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

“he comes across as alarmingly unpredictable, leaping out at unsuspecting passers-by and startling them with a moral challenge.”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup

“The highest hope of Socrates’ peers, of young Athenian men, was to serve Athens by dying for her.”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

“Their fathers had been slaughtered over the stretch of a half-century by the Persians, their mothers raped. And still they had not caved in.”
― Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life