The best tragedies are conflicts between a hero and his destiny.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing.

Governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.

We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends behave to us

No one chooses what does not rest with himself, but only what he thinks can be attained by his own act.

To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.