Named source · 4th century BCE

Politics: A Treatise on Government Quotes by Aristotle: Context & Meanings

4 quotations linked to Politics: A Treatise on Government by or associated with Aristotle, with source notes, explanations and related topics.

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Aristotle’s Politics, represented through William Ellis’s public-domain English translation

Topics and ideas

Political association, law, citizenship, common good, reason, justice, shared responsibility and Aristotle’s account of human beings as political animals.

English wording

Translation

William Ellis — Translator · Ancient Greek → English

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Represented passages

4 quotations with source context and meaning

Source identified1

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“Law is reason without desire.”

Aristotle

Meaning & context

Good law is idealized as judgment governed by reason rather than by the changing appetites or personal passions of an individual ruler.

Source details

Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book III, Chapter XVI, William Ellis translation; represented through the 1912 Dent witness / Project Gutenberg #6762. In comparing rule by a person with rule by law, Aristotle says that passion can affect even the best rulers and concludes that law is reason without desire.

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“Man is naturally a political animal.”

Aristotle

Meaning & context

Human beings naturally form communities in which speech, judgment, cooperation, law, and shared ideas of justice shape common life.

Source details

Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book I, Chapter II, William Ellis translation; represented through the Dent edition first issued in 1912 and Project Gutenberg #6762. Aristotle argues that the city is a natural association and says that man is naturally a political animal; this remains ancient political philosophy in translation, not a modern empirical classification.

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“The safety of the ship is the common business of all of them.”

Aristotle

Meaning & context

People with different roles can still share responsibility for preserving the larger community on which all of their particular roles depend.

Source details

Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book III, Chapter IV, William Ellis translation; represented through the 1912 Dent witness / Project Gutenberg #6762. Aristotle compares citizens with sailors whose different offices share one common concern: the safety of the ship, paralleling the safety of the political community.

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“All those governments which have a common good in view are rightly established and strictly just.”

Aristotle

Meaning & context

Political rule is judged by whether it aims at a shared good rather than merely advancing the private advantage of those holding power.

Source details

Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book III, Chapter VI, William Ellis translation; represented through the 1912 Dent witness / Project Gutenberg #6762. Aristotle distinguishes governments ordered toward the common good from regimes serving rulers’ private advantage; the exact sentence falls before the edition’s Chapter VII heading and therefore belongs to Chapter VI.

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Aristotle’s Politics, represented through William Ellis’s public-domain English translation

Topics and ideas

Translation

William Ellis — Translator · Ancient Greek → English

Why the edition matters

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4 quotations with source context and meaning

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