Browse 7 quotations connecting Plato with Justice, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
These passages do not repeat a single definition of justice. In The Republic, Socrates tests whether a just person can intentionally injure an enemy, and later connects justice with the excellence of the soul; Book IV frames justice as keeping each part of the imagined city to its own work. In Crito, the imprisoned Socrates asks whether one may betray what one judges right and insists that wrongdoing does not become just because one has been wronged. In Laws, which has no Socrates as a character, the Athenian Stranger defines injustice as disordered impulses while discussing laws for the proposed city. The Republic, Crito and Laws are three distinct philosophical dialogues, not separate versions of one aphorism. All English wording follows the named Benjamin Jowett public-domain texts; the speakers’ questions and lawmaking arguments are not timeless factual findings.
Sources represented here include The Republic, Crito, Laws.
“Then we must do no wrong?”
The brief question tests whether the previously accepted principle against wrongdoing still holds when obedience to it becomes personally costly.
Crito, Benjamin Jowett translation; Socrates is testing the moral premises that will govern his decision about escaping prison.
“Ought a man to do what he admits to be right, or ought he to betray the right?”
Socrates asks whether acting on one’s considered judgment about right and wrong should be set aside when the costs are severe. In the prison conversation, the question tests whether escaping a wrongful sentence can be justified under the principles he and Crito have accepted.
Crito, Socrates questioning Crito during the prison discussion after establishing a rule against retaliation; Benjamin Jowett English translation, Project Gutenberg #1657. The sentence begins after Socrates says he will put the next point as a question. The question is not an unqualified defense of obedience to every law; the dialogue stages an argument about obligations to the city.
“When anger and fear, and pleasure and pain, and jealousies and desires, tyrannize over the soul, whether they do any harm or not—I call all this injustice.”
The Athenian Stranger defines injustice in terms of uncontrolled impulses ruling a person, even before judging the harmful consequences of a particular act. He is distinguishing a disordered character from the later task of classifying and punishing wrongdoing under civic law.
Laws, Book IX, the Athenian Stranger replying to Cleinias while designing criminal laws for an imagined city. Benjamin Jowett English translation, Project Gutenberg #1750. This is the concluding clause of a longer first-person definition that begins “And now I can define to you clearly”; preserving it as an extract does not make it a remark by Socrates (who is absent from Laws).
“Now I want you to tell me truly whether virtue is one whole, of which justice and temperance and holiness are parts; or whether all these are only the names of one and the same thing: that is the doubt which still lingers in my mind.”
Socrates challenges Protagoras to clarify whether moral excellences such as justice, temperance and holiness make up different parts of a single virtue or name the same property. The question tests the structure of virtue rather than giving the reader an easy definition. Protagoras proposes an analogy with distinct parts of a face, and their discussion goes on to scrutinize the claim.
Plato, Protagoras, approximately Stephanus 329c–d; Socrates asks Protagoras about the unity of virtue after the sophist describes civic instruction and the acquisition of good character. Protagoras, not Socrates, answers that its qualities are distinct parts. Exact sentence from Benjamin Jowett English, Project Gutenberg #1591, in the dialogue proper after the opening philosophical and mythic arguments, not in translator commentary.
“Justice was doing one’s own business, and not being a busybody.”
Justice in the city is connected with people fulfilling appropriate responsibilities rather than constantly interfering in roles that are not theirs.
The Republic, Book IV; the statement summarizes a definition developed within Socrates’ argument about the ordered city.
“And we have admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and injustice the defect of the soul?”
Socrates treats justice as a quality by which a soul performs its work well, rather than simply an advantage in public reputation or trade. This concluding question ties the earlier inquiry about justice to the dialogue’s claim about how people live.
The Republic, Book I, close of Socrates’s argument with Thrasymachus about the function and excellence of the soul. Benjamin Jowett English translation, Project Gutenberg #1497. It belongs to a provisional exchange that ends with Socrates acknowledging that the inquiry has not fully determined what justice is; it is not a scientific claim about the soul.
“Then to injure a friend or any one else is not the act of a just man, but of the opposite, who is the unjust?”
Socrates argues that deliberately harming another person cannot be a proper exercise of justice, including when someone calls the target an enemy. This challenges the earlier suggestion that a just person should help friends and hurt enemies.
The Republic, Book I, Socrates replying to Polemarchus in the examination of the maxim that justice helps friends and harms enemies. Benjamin Jowett English translation, Project Gutenberg #1497. The source presents a question in dialogue, not a standalone personal motto from Plato; the moral argument considers whether hurting someone can make that person better.
