“... perhaps helping at the hospital there as the attitude is so medical, much influenced by Plato but opposed to Christianity. It expresses quite opposite views on at least one topic, sometimes praising love and nature, sometimes asceticism: so the authors wrote independently. But they all carry the same tone of feeling. They are full of information ...”

“... place of statistical boundaries, which leave groups surrounded by the ‘hybrid’ zone of which Plato speaks with regard to the boundary of being and non-being, a challenge to the discriminatory power of social taxonomies (Young or old? Rich or poor? Middle-class or lower-middle?), the numerus clausus, in the extreme form it receives from discriminatory ...”

“... the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians should: Swinburne read Plato under Jowett at Balliol, but he also read Sade with Monckton Milnes at Fryston Hall. Investigation does not reveal that assurance, certitude or consensus we have invented in order to guide us in our present jam. The figures that appear in this landscape are ...”

“... was Aristotle Pulling steadily at the bottle, wrote John Crowe Ransom comparing Aristotle with Plato, but he pulled no more steadily than Anthony Burgess. His wife Lynne knocked back two bottles of white wine and a pint of gin daily, and his intake seems to have been equal though not identical. The wonder is not that Lynne died but that her husband ...”

“... interpretative power with their readers. Socrates complains of this surrender of authority in Plato’s Phaedrus: a writing cannot correct a mistaken reading of itself, cannot impose its authority on the reader, cannot answer back. The history of punctuation is in part the history of authors’ attempts to wrest power from readers, and of ...”

“... not obscure the fact that these banal contentions are froth on the surface of some powerful tides. Plato in the Ion finds it worth while to spend a whole dialogue on demolishing the ill-founded pretensions of a professor of literature. Two key passages in the Republic are concerned with the place of poetry in the education of the guardians – the second of ...”

“... as is Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot.One scoreline in the Yale Book is the most revealing of all: Plato 11, Mark Twain 154. The equivalent figures in the 2014 Oxford Dictionary are Plato 18, Twain 34. Twain spoke and wrote to be quoted, as did epigones of his such as H.L. Mencken, whose Little Book in C Major scores 13 in ...”

“... had managed to evade her doctor’s disapproval of too much weighty reading, since ‘luckily my Plato looks as good as a novel on the outside,’ was a woman whose prose style was thick with casual quotation and paraphrase; the three and a half pages of the Plato letter alone require more than two pages of single-spaced ...”

“... but also the subtlety of the issues he is analysing comes from his claim that Nietzsche is playing Plato to his own Socrates. Like Nietzsche himself, Nehamas is by training and profession a specialist in ancient Greek thought. A philosopher with a PhD from Princeton and now teaching at the University of Pennsylvania after several years at the University of ...”

“... the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible to conceive,’ Shelley says of Plato in his polemic A Defence of Poetry; he translated the Symposium, and once said he would rather be damned with Plato and Bacon than go to heaven with the Anglican worthies Paley and Malthus. ‘You know that I always seek ...”

“... to extend the university’s influence over Ruskin College as exhorting the workers: ‘Back to Plato! Back to Aristotle!’ Yet the name of their movement was inspired by De Leon’s lectures on Roman history. Early issues of Plebs included a series of articles on Greek and Roman economic development by William Craik, a railway worker from South Wales who ...”

“... we owe the notion of the separation of reason from passion, the idea that the human soul is as Plato brilliantly describes it in his dialogue Phaedrus, like a charioteer trying to control a chariot pulled by two horses, one good and one bad. The connection between destructive passion and animals is expressed in the earliest Greek texts. Passion ...”

“... with examples that range easily from Job to Jakobson, Hillel and Horace to Dickens and Dickinson, Plato to Wittgenstein, Aeschylus to Ashbery. And he returns to the essay’s origin by adopting georgic digression as his structural principle. Philosophers’ questions lead to questions answered by questions; self-questionings lead on to closure by ...”

“... Violence (plebeians at it again), and so on to Citizenship (more discipline required for taming of Plato’s ‘savage beast’ or the Selbournian equivalent – ‘the universal plebeian’). The manifestly sombre tone of the contest is heightened by Selbourne’s technique. This is a man who comes out punching and never stops from one gong to the ...”

“... psychologists have such a down on minds. Psychologists, of all people. In philosophy, ever since Plato, the mainstream opinion has been that the mind is the organ of thought; thinking is what the mind is for, and we act as we do because we think what we do. But psychologists, for the last hundred years or so, have mostly viewed that sort of ...”