A Quote by Michael Sandel

If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community. 'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.

Michael Sandel

Quote Topics

After Apart Association Been Coming Coming Together Common Community Conditions Considered End Exchange Good Good Life Had Injustice Institutions Intercourse Life Living Means Mutual Necessary Polis Political Preventing Purpose Really Residence Sake Same Site Social Social Life Spirit Still Sufficient Together Were While Writes

Quote Author

Michael Sandel
American - Philosopher
Born: March 5, 1953

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

Rebecca Goldstein

The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

Rebecca Goldstein

Balancing the common good with the freedom and liberty to exercise that individuality has been and remains a challenge for those committed to democracy while understanding that the polis ensures our participation and therefore our citizenship.

David Blunkett

man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature.

Moses Finley

Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city.

Samuel R. Delany

I prefer a positive view of freedom, drawing on another tradition of political thinking that goes all the way back to the ancient Greek polis.

David Blunkett

Toward the end of the Cold War, capitalism created a military horror: the neutron bomb, a weapon that destroys life while leaving buildings intact. During the Fourth World War, however, a new wonder has been discovered: the financial bomb. Unlike those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this new bomb not only destroys the polis (here, the nation), imposing death, terror, and misery on those who live there, but also transforms its target into just another piece in the puzzle of economic globalization.

Subcomandante Marcos

During Holi, my mom prepares lovely puran polis, and everyone in my family makes an exception in their diet plan to include this delicious food item!

Sonali Bendre

The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions.

William O. Douglas

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."

Rebecca Goldstein

Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, 'This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.'

Will Self

Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.

Finley Peter Dunne

If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.

George Steiner

The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race.

Giuseppe Mazzini

The court is like a palace built of marble; I mean that it is made up of very hard but very polished people. [Fr., La cour est comme un edifice bati de marbre; je veux dire qu'elle est composee d'hommes fort durs mais fort polis.]