Aristotle Political Quotes

#1. People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.

Aristotle.

#2. Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship.

Aristotle.

#3. For Aristotle, friendship in its highest form has a political or civic dimension. We love our friends not just because we like each other or are useful to each other, but because we share the same values and ideals for our society, and come together to advance those ideals.

Jules Evans

#4. One should not study what is best, but also what is possible, and similarly what is easier and more attainable by all.

Aristotle.

#5. The fact is that all the important political philosophers and scientists from the great Aristotle on, with the exception of those of the French Enlightenment and Mill, have sided with the powers that be.

Mario Bunge

#6. The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.

Aristotle.

#7. 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.

Aristotle.

#8. The right constitutions, three in number- kingship, aristocracy, and polity- and the deviations from these, likewise three in number - tyranny from kingship, oligarchy from aristocracy, democracy from polity.

Aristotle.

#9. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question

Michel Foucault

#10. One Greek city state had a fundamental law: anyone proposing revisions to the constitution did so with a noose around his neck. If his proposal lost he was instantly hanged.

Aristotle.

#11. The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.

Aristotle.

#12. Virtue is a greater good than honour; and one might perhaps accordingly suppose that virtue rather than honour is the end of the political life.

Aristotle.

#13. The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.

Aristotle.

#14. Perhaps here we have a clue to the reason why royal rule used to exist formerly, namely the difficulty of finding enough men of outstanding virtue ..

Aristotle.

#15. A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few.

Aristotle.

#16. The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

Aristotle.

#17. Hence anyone who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and, generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits.

Aristotle.

#18. Human beings are by nature political animals

Aristotle.

#19. The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the "philosophy of human affairs;" but more frequently Political or Social Science.

Aristotle.

#20. Man is a political animal. A man who lives alone is either a Beast or a God

Aristotle.

#21. For desire is like a wild beast, and anger perverts rulers and the very best of men. Hence law is intelligence without appetition.

Aristotle.

#22. The state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

Aristotle.

#23. To leave the number of births unrestricted, as is done in most states, inevitably causes poverty among the citizens, and poverty produces crime and faction.

Aristotle.

#24. The fact that it took the rise of democracies and otherwise open societies at Athens and elsewhere to create the climate in which public eloquence became a political indispensability.

Aristotle.

#25. Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

Aristotle.

#26. Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for thepurpose of making mana political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech.

Aristotle.

#27. A human being is a naturally political [animal].

Aristotle.

#28. Man is a political animal' said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men.

William S. Burroughs

#29. It is clear that those constitutions which aim at the common good are right, as being in accord with absolute justice; while those which aim only at the good of the rulers are wrong.

Aristotle.

#30. A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange ... Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not mere companionship.

Aristotle.

#31. Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Hannah Arendt

#32. Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle.

#33. The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class.

Aristotle.

#34. That the equalization of property exercises an influence on political society was clearly understood even by some of the old legislators. Laws were made by Solon and others prohibiting an individual from possessing as much land as he pleased;

Aristotle.

#35. It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle.

#36. A man who examines each subject from a philosophical standpoint cannot neglect them: he has to omit nothing, and state the truth about each topic.

Aristotle.

#37. The noble things and the just things, which the political art examines, admit of much dispute and variability, such that they are held to exist by law11 alone and not by nature.

Aristotle.