Sophist Quotes
In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist; the man of non-presence and non-truth. Writing is thus already on the scene. The incompatibility between written and the trueis clearly announced at the moment Socrates starts to recount the way in which men are carried out themselves by pleasure, become absent from themselves, forget themselves and die in the thrill of song.
Jacques Derrida
The easiest and most popular way of practically refuting... any Fallacy is, by bringing forward a parallel case, where it leads to a manifest absurdity. A metaphysical objection may still be urged against many cases in which we thus reason from calculation of chances; an objection not likely indeed practically to influence any one, but which may afford the Sophist a triumph over those who are unable to find a solution.
Richard Whately
Hence, when these men praised Philip as being more eloquent, more handsome, and to crown all, able to drink more than any one else, Demosthenes sneeringly replied that the first of these qualities was excellent in a sophist, the second in a woman, and the third in a sponge, but that they were none of them such as became a king.
Plutarch
![[The sophist] is concerned with wisdom, not for its own sake, not because he hates the lie in the soul more than anything else, but for the sake of the honor or the prestige that attends wisdom. (Leo Strauss)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/82/leo-strauss-anything-honor-319882.webp)
Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.
Plato
The method of exhaustion was not discovered all at once; we find traces of gropings after such a method before it was actually evolved. It was perhaps Antiphon. the sophist, of Athens, a contemporary of Socrates, who took the first step. He inscribed a square (or, according to another account, a triangle) in a circle, then bisected the arcs subtended by the sides, and so inscribed a polygon of double the number of sides; he then repeated the process, and maintained that, by continuing it, we should at last arrive at a polygon with sides so small as to make the polygon coincident with the circle. Thought this was formally incorrect, it nevertheless contained the germ of the method of exhaustion.
Thomas Little Heath
The trisection of an angle was effected by means of a curve discovered by Hippias of Elis, the sophist, a contemporary of Hippocrates as well as of Democritus and Socrates. The curve was called the quadratrix because it also served (in the hands, as we are told, of Dinostratus, brother of Menæchmus, and of Nicomedes) for squaring the circle. It was theoretically constructed as the locus of the point of intersection of two straight lines moving at uniform speeds and in the same time, one motion being angular and the other rectilinear.
Thomas Little Heath
Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical” consciousness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
Peter Sloterdijk
