Daily Inspiration Quote by Aristotle

Aristotle is quietly detonating the fantasy that good government can be solved once and for all in ink. “Even when laws have been written down” concedes the great achievement of a polis that trades whim for rule-of-law; the kicker is “ought not always to remain unaltered,” which treats permanence as a temptation, not a virtue. The line is less an invitation to chaos than a warning against legal fossilization: a city changes, its habits change, its economy changes, its power shifts. A statute that was once a stabilizer can become a trap.

The intent is characteristically Aristotelian: practical, anti-utopian, allergic to absolutes. He’s carving a middle path between two dangers he knew well in fourth-century Athens and its neighbors: rulers who rewrite rules to suit themselves, and constitutions treated like sacred relics while real life outgrows them. The subtext is that law is instrumental, not divine. It exists to cultivate a workable form of justice among fallible people, and that means it must be judged by outcomes in lived civic life, not by its pedigree.

Context matters: Aristotle watched democracies topple into demagoguery and oligarchies harden into resentment. His Politics is essentially a field guide to regime survival. Amendability is a pressure valve. Change too rarely and you court revolt; change too easily and you teach citizens that power, not principle, is sovereign. The sentence is compact because it’s aiming at a sophisticated civic audience: people who want stability, but need to hear that stability sometimes requires revision.