Great Dialogues of Plato Quotes

“For to fear death, gentlemen, is only to think you are wise when you are not; for it is to think you know what you don’t know. No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well. Surely this is the objectionable kind of ignorance, to think one knows what one does not know? But in this, gentlemen, here also perhaps I am different from the general run of mankind, and if I should claim to be wiser than someone in something it would be in this, that as I do not know well enough about what happens in the house of Hades, so I do not think I know; but to do wrong, and to disobey those who are better than myself, whether god or man, that I know to be bad and disgraceful.”
― Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato

“Anything but madmen, Socrates; the young men are much madder who pay them money; and madder still those, their relations, who entrust young people to them; maddest of all, the cities which allow them to come in and do not kick them”
― Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato

“What I do not know, I don't think I do.”
― Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato

“You must honour and obey and conciliate your country when angry, more than a father; you must either persuade her, or do whatever she commands; you must bear in quiet anything she bids you bear, be it stripes or prison; or if she leads you to war, to be wounded or to die, this you must do, and it is right; you must not give way or retreat or leave your post, but in war and in court and everywhere you must do whatever city and country commands, or else convince her where the right lies. Violence is not allowed against mother or father, much less against your country.”
― Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato

“For the bystanders always believe that I am wise myself in the matters on which I test another; but the truth really is, gentlemen, that the god in fact is wise, and in this oracle he means that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and it appears that he does not say this of Socrates, but simply adds my name to take me as an example, as if he were to say that this one of you human beings is wisest, who like Socrates knows that he is in truth worth nothing as regards wisdom. This is what I still, even now, go about searching and investigating in the god’s way, if ever I think one of our people, or a foreigner, is wise; and whenever I don’t find him so, I help the god by proving that the man is not wise.”
― Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato