The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

[the virtues] cannot exist without Prudence. A proof of this is that everyone, even at the present day, in defining Virtue, after saying what disposition it is [i.e. moral virtue] and specifying the things with which it is concerned, adds that it is a disposition determined by the right principle; and the right principle is the principle determined by Prudence.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference.

The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy.

Money originated with royalty and slavery, it has nothing to do with democracy or the struggle of the empoverished enslaved majority.