Sophists Quotes

Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world? ~ Rudolf Arnheim

What makes a man a 'sophist' is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. (1355b 17) ~ Aristotle.

I fantasize that our politicians have been moved by the dialogues of Plato, and thus contemplate the ancient conflict of the sophists versus the lovers of truth. ~ Daniel S. Loeb

The causes which ruined the Republic of Athens illustrate the connection of ethics with politics rather than the vices inherent to democracy. A State which has only 30,000 full citizens in a population of 500,000, and is governed, practically, by about 3000 people at a public meeting, is scarcely democratic. The short triumph of Athenian liberty, and its quick decline, belong to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong. An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. It was a very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no moral obligation. The will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life, and every man and body of men had the right to do what they had the means of doing. Tyranny was no wrong, and it was hypocrisy to deny oneself the enjoyment it affords. The doctrine of the Sophists gave no limits to power and no security to freedom; it inspired that cry of the Athenians, that they must not be hindered from doing what they pleased, and the speeches of men like Athenagoras and Euphemus, that the democracy may punish men who have done no wrong, and that nothing that is profitable is amiss. And Socrates perished by the reaction which they provoked. ~ John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

If thou continuous to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men. ~ Socrates

It's as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion
for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent
took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups ~ Simone Weil

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man. ~ Matthew Arnold

Above all things I entreat you to preserve your faith in Christ. It is my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, my peace amid tumult. For all the evil I have committed, my gracious pardon; and for every effort, my exceeding great reward. I have found it to be so. I can smile with pity at the infidel whose vanity makes him dream that I should barter such a blessing for the few subtleties from the school of the cold-blooded sophists. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.

From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be - what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing - I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.

We do not know - neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I - what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know. ~ Socrates

I only ask in all kindness that the man who wishes at this time to have my books will by no means let them be a hindrance to his own study of the Scriptures, but read them as I read the orders and the ordures of the pope and the books of the sophists. ~ Martin Luther

Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life." Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, aweapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding. ~ Max Stirner

She catches hold, then of this word "nothing," and stabs at it with a multitude of words and examples, and by means of a suitable interpretation, reduces it to this, that "nothing" can mean the same as "only a little thing" or "an imperfect thing;" she expounds in other words what the Sophists have hitherto taught regarding this passage: "Apart from me you can do nothing," that is to say "nothing perfectly. ~ Martin Luther

The Greek culture of the Sophists had developed out of all the Greek instincts; it belongs to the culture of the Periclean age as necessarily as Plato does not: it has its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of the old philosophy; it finds expression in, e.g., the high culture of Thucydides. And – it has ultimately shown itself to be right: every advance in epistemological and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists – Our contemporary way of thinking is to a great extent Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean: it suffices to say it is Protagorean, because Protagoras represented a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not - what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want. ~ David Foster Wallace

The leaning of sophists toward the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quantity. The highroads are dreary but they lead to the town. ~ James Joyce

The difference between the Sophist and the ignorant (or stupid) is not the difference between an intentional error (into which one falls in order to trip up one's adversary) and an unintentional error (of which both interlocutors are victims). The Sophist should not be interpreted as someone who uses error as a trap and uses faulty reasoning as a crafty weapon. He occupies a different dimension from that of true or faulty reasoning; he is on the side of the semblance of reasoning. He occupies the dimension of shadow and reflection; he occupies a reasoning mirage, but he does not really reason. And this invalidation, produced not by error but by semblance, affects not only the Sophist's reasoning moreover, it affects all his wisdom, his sophia. ~ Michel Foucault

An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Let, therefore, pious readers learn to hate and detest those profane sophists, who thus deliberately corrupt and adulterate the Scriptures, in order that they may give some color to their delusions. ~ John Calvin

These were the Sophists, and their interest was in teaching the use of argumentative skills of the sort previous philosophers had exhibited, but as a means of attaining worldly success, for instance in politics. Unfortunately, they gained a reputation for being rather cynical and unscrupulous in their argumentative standards: any old argument would do as long as it persuaded one's listener, even if it was totally fallacious; what mattered was winning the debate, not arriving at the truth, and the line between logic and rhetoric was thus blurred. (The Sophists are still with us. Today we call them "lawyers," "professors of literary criticism," and "Michael Moore.") ~ Edward Feser

The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The sophists were as a rule men who had traveled widely and seen different forms of government. Both conventions and local laws in the city-states could vary widely. This led the Sophists to raise the question of what was natural and what was socially induced. By doing this, they paved the way for social criticism in the city-state of Athens. ~ Jostein Gaarder

This page is related to that page.

You're reading something constructed using a rhetorical practice, something informed both directly and indirectly by the entire history of composition up until this point, from the Sophists to Derrida. But you're navigating it using pure logical statements, using spans of text or images that, when clicked or selected, get other files and display them on your screen. The text is based in the rhetorical tradition; the links are based in the logical tradition; and somewhere in there is something worth figuring out.

...the entire history of Western pedagogy [is] an oscillation between these two traditions, between the tradition of rhetoric as a means for obtaining power - language as just a collection of interconnected signifiers co-relating, without a grounding in "truth," and the tradition of seeking truth, of searching for a fundamental, logical underpinning for the universe, using ideas like the platonic solids or Boolean logic, or tools like expert systems and particle accelerators ... what is the relationship between narratives and logic? What is sprezzatura for the web? Hell if I know. My way of figuring it all out is to build the system and write inside it, because I'm too dense to work out theories. ~ Paul Ford

I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future. ~ Apollonius Of Tyana

Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Christians would show sense if they dispatched these argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists and undefeated Albertists along with the whole regiment of Sophists to fight the Turks and Saracens instead of sending those armies of dull-witted soldiers with whom they've long been carrying on war with no result. ~ Desiderius Erasmus

As you can imagine, the wandering Sophists created bitter wrangling in Athens by pointing out that there were no absolute norms for what was right or wrong. ~ Jostein Gaarder

The reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

They need to get a good PR guy." "What's a PR guy?" "They're kind of like the old Greek sophists who played with words until you believed up was down. PR guys get paid to make people believe that a pile of shit is an investment in soil fertility. Professional liars." "Ah!" Manannan's expression lit with comprehension. "They are politicians?" "No, they're smarter and less pretty. They advise politicians. ~ Kevin Hearne