Political leaders, lacking documents that could be kept secret (apart from the occasional exception), lacking media they could control, were of necessity brought into a direct and immediate relationship with their constituents, and therefore under more and direct and immediate control.

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.

Knowledge for its own sake was meaningless, its mere accumulation a waste of time. Knowledge must lead to understanding.

What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.

In the western world today everyone is a democrat.

Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.

A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks.