Daily Inspiration Quote by Socrates

A provocation disguised as a compliment, this line works by yanking the reader out of complacent “fairness” talk and into male anxiety. The pivot is the word “once”: equality is framed not as a stable condition but as a threshold event, after which the old hierarchy snaps. Socrates (or, more honestly, the tradition speaking through him) isn’t simply “praising women.” He’s testing the logic of patriarchy by taking its hidden premise to an extreme: if men’s dominance is natural, it should survive equal conditions. If it doesn’t, then male superiority was never innate; it was propped up by law, custom, and enforced dependence.

The subtext is sharper: equality is portrayed as a risk to men, not a correction of injustice. “Becomes his superior” reads like a warning men tell themselves to justify keeping the playing field tilted. It’s the rhetorical move that turns empowerment into threat: don’t educate her too much, don’t give her property rights, don’t let her speak in public, because she’ll outrun you. That fear-logic still echoes in modern backlash politics, where inclusion gets recast as displacement.

Context matters. Classical Athens was profoundly unequal, yet Plato’s dialogues flirt with the radical idea that women could share in guardian roles if trained the same way. Whether the line is authentically Socratic is secondary to its cultural function: it stages equality as an experiment, then dares the audience to admit what the experiment would reveal. If superiority emerges, the quote suggests, it indicts men less for being weaker than for having insisted on a rigged contest.