That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.

It was while I was studying philosophy that I came to understand. . . that it is no sign of moral or spiritual strength to believe that for which one has no evidence, neither a priori evidence as in math, nor a posteriori evidence as in science. . . . It's a violation almost immoral in its transgressiveness to shirk the responsibilities of rationality.

It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.