Antiphon Quotes
Antiphon was a Greek sophist of late fifth-century Athens, sometimes identified with Antiphon of Rhamnus, the celebrated orator and statesman of the same period. The two long fragments of his treatise On Truth, recovered on Egyptian papyri in the early twentieth century, contain the earliest surviving sophistical argument that justice as defined by law is at odds with what nature requires, and that, by nature, all human beings, Greek and barbarian, are alike. The quotes below are attributed to Antiphon, organized by topic.
Browse Antiphon by topic
Antiphon on Justice
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Attributed to Antiphon:
“Justice as the city defines it is the obedience to laws of the state in which one lives.”
Antiphon on Knowledge
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“East? They wouldn’t know the bloody East if they saw it. Not if you was to hand it to them on a plate would they know it was the East. That’s where the East is, there.' He waved his hand wildly into the black night. 'Out there, west. You wasn’t there, so you wouldn’t know. Now I was. Palestine Police from the end of the war till we packed up. That was the East. You was in India, and that’s not the East any more than this is. So you know nothing about it either. So you needn’t be talking.”
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“Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o’clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, 'Did you bring any beer back with you?”
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“Sultan Aladdin… had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry… their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour.”
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“His real wife, his houri, his paramour was everywhere waiting, genie-like, in a bottle. The hymeneal gouging-off of the bottle-top, the kiss of the brown bitter yeasty flow, the euphoria far beyond the release of detumescence.”
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“Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…”
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“The country will absorb you and you will cease to be Victor Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric. You may become a Muslim. You may forget your English, or at least lose your English accent. You may end in a kampong, no longer a foreigner, an old brownish man with many wives and children, one of the elders whom the young will be encouraged to consult on matters of the heart. You will be ruined.”
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Antiphon on Life
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“It had, perhaps, not been a very edifying life. On the booze in England, in India, in Malaya… And then a couple of gins for breakfast and then the first beers of the day in a kedai … He had been driven out of that Eden…because of his sinful desire to taste what was forbidden.”
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Antiphon on Mind
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Attributed to Antiphon:
“Care of the soul, not the city alone, is the work of philosophy.”
Antiphon on Nature
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Attributed to Antiphon:
“What nature requires, the laws often forbid; what nature forbids, the laws often require.”
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Attributed to Antiphon:
“By nature we are all equally born; only convention divides us.”
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“…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women”
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Antiphon on Time
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Attributed to Antiphon:
“Time is what brings to light the truth of every prediction.”
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“The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.”
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Antiphon on Truth
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“…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.”
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