Plato (n.) loved order exclusively, like any timid philosopher frightened by the democratic turbulence of his times into an extreme neglect of individual values. He arranges men in classes like an entomologist classifying flies; and he is not averse to using priestly humbug to secure his ends.
Plato's (n.) ideal State is static; it might easily become an old-fogey society, ruled by inflexible octogenarians hostile to invention and jealous of change. It is mere science without art; it exalts order, so dear to the scientific mind, and quite neglects that liberty which is the soul of art; it worships the name of beauty, but exiles the artists who alone can make beauty or point it out. It is a Sparta or a Prussia, not an ideal state..
Plato (n.) is too anxious to have the moving picture of this world become a fixed and still tableau. What he lacks, above all, is the Heracleitean sense of flux and change.
Plato (n.) conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation but for the remolding of the world.
Plato (n.) retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth.
Plato (n.) so loved the general and universal that in the Re-public he destroyed the individual to make a perfect state.
Plato (n.) is philosophy, and philosophy Plato - Burn the libraries, for their value is in his books.
Plato (n.) exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendor and harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musical impressions, which hurry the persuasions onward as in a breathless career."
Plato (n.) worshiped beauty as well as truth, and gave to ideas the living movement of drama, and clothed them in all the radiance of art.
Plato (n.) is a lover, a lover of comrades, the intoxication of dialectical revelry, and hidden reality.