28 Quotes by Isocrates

Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement.

It was the principle of this Court that deterrent laws, however strict, are useless without positive moral discipline; that the happiness of citizens depends, not on having the walls of their porticoes covered with laws, but on having justice in their hearts.

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement.Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs, therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity or undue depression in adversity.

Under that democracy, license was not confounded with freedom. Political 'equality' has been understood in two senses: as meaning either that all are to share absolutely alike, or that every man is to receive his due. Our ancestors preferred that 'equality' which does not efface the distinction between merit and worthlessness.

It is up-hill work to oppose our prejudices; we have a democracy, but freedom of speech is enjoyed only by the most foolish members of this Assembly and by the comic poets in the theatre. As, however, I am not here to court your votes, I shall say what I think...

Their successors, instead of ruling for the good of their subjects, tyrannize for their own; and they met with the fate of tyrants. No person not reckless of the past could wish to imitate them. The earlier and the later experiences of Athens prove, in fact, two things: that Attica produces good men, and that empire spoils them.

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement. Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs, therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity or undue depression in adversity.

Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.