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

man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature.

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

Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

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.

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