Now all orators effect their demonstrative proofs by allegation either of enthymems or examples, and, besides these, in no other way whatever.
Everything is done with a goal, and that goal is “good”.
What is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness, and make happiness identical with the good life and successful living. They disagree, however, about the meaning of happiness.
For that which has become habitual, becomes as it were natural.
That body is heavier than another which, in an equal bulk, moves downward quicker.
The good citizen need not of necessity possess the virtue which makes a good man.
If ‘bounded by a surface’ is the definition of body there cannot be an infinite body either intelligible or sensible.
It is not easy to determine the nature of music, or why any one should have a knowledge of it.
A body in motion can maintain this motion only if it remains in contact with a mover.
A flatterer is a friend who is your inferior, or pretends to be so.
Life is only meaningful when we are striving for a goal .
Saying the words that come from knowledge is no sign of having it.
No one who desires to become good will become good unless he does good things.
We should aim rather at leveling down our desires than leveling up our means.
One citizen differs from another, but the salvation of the community is the common business of them all. This community is the constitution; the virtue of the citizen must therefore be relative to the constitution of which he is a member.
A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state, especially of the highest of all. The government is everywhere sovereign in the state, and the constitution is in fact the government.
When the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name – a constitution.
The citizens begin by giving up some part of the constitution, and so with greater ease the government change something else which is a little more important, until they have undermined the whole fabric of the state.
In the first place, then, men should guard against the beginning of change, and in the second place they should not rely upon the political devices of which I have already spoken invented only to deceive the people, for they are proved by experience to be useless.
The form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority, govern, and an oligarchy when the rich and the noble govern, they being at the same time few in number.