Robert Nozick Quotes

The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

My favorite class as an undergraduate was a political theory class on justice. Now, 'justice' is hardly a self-defining term, and much smarter men than I have developed various definitions over the centuries. The class put Plato at one end and Nietzsche at the other, and off we went.

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

I took all the philosophy courses I could.

I've deliberately studied many things that I know, going in, I won't be able to assimilate. I read Plato, St. Thomas, the mystics, to exercise my mind.

I was in college, and I studied everything, but was really not good at anything until I found philosophy, and, then, political science. I thought, 'Wow, this is something I really enjoy.' I kind of got into that whole world of law and political science. I was really into it and enjoying it, and then I took an acting elective, and that was it.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.

When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

I remember seeing a stage version of Plato's 'Symposium' and being really moved because it was written by a man rather than a culture.

Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.

A magazine editor recently asked me to sit down on my 40th birthday and write an article on the most important things I had learned in my first 40 years. I told him that the chief thing I had learned was that the copybook maxims are true, but that too many people forget this once they go out into the heat and hustle and bustle of the battle of life and only realize their truth once one foot is beginning to slip into the grave. The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

My point of view and philosophy continues to change and grow. As the years go by you go through this evolution.

Think more about who you are and less about what you do, for if you are just, your ways will be just.

Happiness is not the end of life: character is.

Justice as fairness provides what we want.

That's what I've decided I am. A seeker of wisdom and truth.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

My parents were only one part of my lineage. I also met a number of mentors, one of whom I nicknamed "Socrates" after the ancient Greek, and wrote about in my first book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior. That book emerged in 1980, as a result of travels around the world and decades of preparation, eventually leading to 15 other books written over the years, culminating in my newest offering, The Four Purposes of Life.

That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.