Gorgias Quotes

“The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know.”
― Plato

“And if persuasive discourse deceived her soul, it is not on that account difficult to defend her and absolve her of responsibility, thus: discourse is a great potentate, which by the smallest and most secret body accomplishes the most divine works; for it can stop fear and assuage pain and produce joy and make mercy abound.”
― Gorgias, Encomium of Helen

“I believe it was Gorgias who was first to posit the impossibility of ever prooving anything - in which case, it might as well have been me to first propose this idea, just now.”
― Dan Garfat-Pratt, Citations: A Brief Anthology

“Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul.”
― H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks

“Analogy and probability are not bedrock; they are lifeboats in an ocean of doubt, and sometimes they founder. So rhetoric tends to the passionate:we argue, not with surety, but as the shipwrecked clinging to the only thing they have.”
― Andrew J. Patrick, Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader

“La retórica y la política demagógica de los demócratas (incluidos los más famosos, como Pericles) trata de halagar a los ciudadanos, no de hacerlos mejores. Se parece a la cosmética y a la repostería, que halagan el gusto sin producir la salud. Pero la buena política (que busca la salud de las almas) es como la gimnasia y la medicina, que tratan de producir la salud del cuerpo, aunque sea mediante ejercicios dolorosos. [Gorgias, Platón].”
― Jesús Mosterín, La Hélade