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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?
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“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?”

Plato

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Source
The Republic
Date
4th century BCE
Local voice
Dialogue speaker · Socrates
English wording
Benjamin Jowett — Translator · from Ancient Greek
Meaning

Meaning of “Then to injure a friend or any one…”

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.

Source context

Where does it come from?

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.

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Speaker context

Why the local voice matters

Socrates speaks in The Republic Book I, Jowett translation.

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Themes

Ideas connected with this quotation

FriendshipPeaceResponsibilityCharacterEthicsJustice
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Let us have faith that right makes might.
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“Let us have faith that right makes might.”

Abraham Lincoln · Cooper Union Address · 1860
Meaning & context

Lincoln reverses the idea that power establishes right, arguing that moral judgment should guide sustained political action rather than treating strength or intimidation as proof of justice.

Source details

Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860, closing passage. Lincoln is defending Republican opposition to the extension of slavery into federal territories; the line retains that antislavery political context.

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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.
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“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.”

Plato · Laws · 4th century BCE
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Athenian Stranger
Meaning & context

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.

Source details

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).

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The rules of justice are accurate in the highest degree, and admit of no exceptions or modifications, but such as may be ascertained as accurately as the rules themselves.
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“The rules of justice are accurate in the highest degree, and admit of no exceptions or modifications, but such as may be ascertained as accurately as the rules themselves.”

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · 1759
Meaning & context

Smith contrasts justice with looser virtues by arguing that its external obligations require unusually precise rules if people are to rely on one another.

Source details

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III discussion of the general rules of morality; Smith contrasts exact rules of justice with more flexible rules of prudence and generosity.

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Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.
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“Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.”

Mary Wollstonecraft · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792
Meaning & context

Different roles do not require different moral standards; Wollstonecraft argues for common principles of responsibility and virtue.

Source details

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; the passage rejects a separate moral standard built around sex rather than shared human duties.

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Then we must do no wrong?
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“Then we must do no wrong?”

Plato · Crito · c. 399 BCE
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Socrates
Meaning & context

The brief question tests whether the previously accepted principle against wrongdoing still holds when obedience to it becomes personally costly.

Source details

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Receive an injury rather than do one.
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“Receive an injury rather than do one.”

Publilius Syrus · The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus · 1856 translation
Meaning & context

Personal suffering is treated as morally preferable to becoming the person who deliberately inflicts unjust harm on another.

Source details

The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, maxim 5, in Darius Lyman’s 1856 English rendering; maxim order can vary across editions.

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