Isocrates biography at QuotationFun

A Short Biography of Isocrates

Author Name:

Isocrates

Born As:

Other Names:

Born:

436

Died:

338




author picture
Rhetorician and  Logographer                          
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isocrates                          
                          
One of the ten Attic orators which included:
Antiphon
Andocides
Lysias
Isaeus
Aeschines
Lycurgus
Demosthenes
Hypereides
Dinarchus                          
Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.

A falsified quote invented during the 2010 financial crisis. Isocrates' actual, more nuanced, quote runs as follows:

Those who directed the state in the time of Solon and Cleisthenes did not establish a polity which, trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and licence to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser.
- Areopagiticus, 7.20.