republic (books 1 - 5)   

or indeed to refrain from laughing when he hears justice
praised? And even if there should be someone who is able to
disprove the truth of my words, and who is satisfied that justice
is best, still he is not angry with the unjust, but is very ready
to forgive them, because he also knows that men are not just
of their own free will; unless, peradventure, there be someone
whom the divinity within him may have inspired with a hatred
of injustice, or who has attained knowledge of the truth--but
no other man. He only blames injustice, who, owing to cow-
ardice or age or some weakness, has not the power of being
unjust. And this is proved by the fact that when he obtains
the power, he immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.

The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the
beginning of the argument, when my brother and I told you
how astonished we were to find that of all the professing pan-
egyrists of justice--beginning with the ancient heroes of whom
any memorial has been preserved to us, and ending with the
men of our own time--no one has ever blamed injustice or
praised justice except with a view to the glories, honors, and
benefits which flow from them. No one has ever adequately de-
scribed either in verse or prose the true essential nature of either
of them abiding in the soul, and invisible to any human or divine
eye; or shown that of all the things of a man's soul which he has
within him, justice is the greatest good, and injustice the great-
est evil. Had this been the universal strain, had you sought to
persuade us of this from our youth upward, we should not have
been on the watch to keep one another from doing wrong, but
everyone would have been his own watchman, because afraid,
if he did wrong, of harboring in himself the greatest of evils.
I dare say that Thrasymachus and others would seriously hold
the language which I have been merely repeating, and words
even stronger than these about justice and injustice, grossly,
as I conceive, perverting their true nature. But I speak in this
vehement manner, as I must frankly confess to you, because
I want to hear from you the opposite side; and I would ask you
to show not only the superiority which justice has over injus-
tice, but what effect they have on the possessor of them which
makes the one to be a good and the other an evil to him. And
please, as Glaucon requested of you, to exclude reputations; for
unless you take away from each of them his true reputation and
add on the false, we shall say that you do not praise justice, but
the appearance of it; we shall think that you are only exhorting
us to keep injustice dark, and that you really agree with Thra-
symachus in thinking that justice is another's good and the in-
terest of the stronger, and that injustice is a man's own profit
and interest, though injurious to the weaker. Now as you
have admitted that justice is one of that highest class of goods
which are desired, indeed, for their results, but in a far greater
degree for their own sakes--like sight or hearing or knowledge
or health, or any other real and natural and not merely conven-
tional good--I would ask you in your praise of justice to regard
one point only: I mean the essential good and evil which justice
and injustice work in the possessors of them. Let others praise
justice and censure injustice, magnifying the rewards and
honors of the one and abusing the other; that is a manner of
arguing which, coming from them, I am ready to tolerate, but
from you who have spent your whole life in the consideration
of this question, unless I hear the contrary from your own lips,
I expect something better. And therefore, I say, not only
prove to us that justice is better than injustice, but show what
they either of them do to the possessor of them, which makes
the one to be a good and the other an evil, whether seen or un-
seen by gods and men.