From all wild beasts, a child is the most difficult to handle.

...there are some who are naturally fitted for philosophy and political leadership, while the rest should follow their lead and let philosophy alone.

There is a ... matter - much more valuable and divine than natural philosophy . ... On this matter I must speak to you in enigmas.

Their military training will ensure success in war, but they must maintain unity by not allowing the state to grow to large, and by ensuring that the measures for promotion and demotion from one class to another are carried out. Above all they must maintain the educational system unchanged; for on education everything else depends, and it is an illusion to imagine that mere legislation without it can effect anything of consequence.

Because, unlike courage and wisdom, which made our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, discipline operates by being diffused throughout the whole of it. It produces a concord between its strongest and weakest and middle elements, whether you define them by the standard of good sense, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding discipline as this sort of natural harmony and agreement between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual.

Because it is correct to make a priority of young people, taking care that they turn out as well as possible.

The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics.