Faith & Spirit Quote by Plato

Equality here isn’t the soft, self-congratulatory kind; it’s a philosophical crowbar aimed at the social order. The line pivots on a deliberately plain image: same earth, one Workman. It’s metaphysics dressed in common materials, stripping aristocratic status of its supposed natural sheen. If princes and peasants come from identical clay, hierarchy starts to look less like destiny and more like an arrangement people keep propping up.

The subtext is sharper than the piety suggests. “However we deceive ourselves” is an accusation: inequality persists not because nature demands it, but because the powerful (and the comfortably complicit) maintain a useful fiction. The sentence performs a double move: it flatters no one, and it leaves no one innocent. Even the peasant can “deceive” himself by accepting the story that he’s made of lesser stuff.

Context matters, because the attribution is suspicious. The language of “dear unto God” and a singular “Workman” reads far more like Christian moral theology than Plato’s polytheistic Athens, where “the gods” and civic virtue were the idiom, not a monotheistic Creator who levels souls. That mismatch is the point culturally: later traditions often recruit the prestige of Greek philosophy to authorize egalitarian ideals that matured in religious and political revolutions. The quote works because it weaponizes origin stories. If you can reframe where humans come from, you can redraw who gets to rule.