Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
PlatoRead
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
Interpretation
The character of a state is shaped by the character of its people.
In this quote, Plato suggests that the nature of a society or government is directly influenced by the moral and ethical character of the individuals that compose it. Just as a person's traits determine how they interact with the world, the collective character of a population dictates the laws, culture, and values of a state, emphasizing the importance of individual virtue in creating a just and effective political system.
In practice
In a political debate, to emphasize the importance of ethical leadership.
Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.
...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells, Which work they know not why, which never halt, Myself unwitting where their Master dwells?
A society that does not value its older people denies its roots and endangers its future. Let us strive to enhance their capacity to support themselves for as long as possible and, when they cannot do so anymore, to care for them.
Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.
Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jewβ or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you β until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.
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