Daily Inspiration Quote by Socrates

Revenge is pitched here not as a temptation to resist but as a category error: once you “return the injury,” you’ve stopped being the harmed party and started being the harm. Socrates’ intent is surgical. He’s not offering saintly pacifism; he’s laying down a moral axiom that refuses to let circumstance rewrite ethics. “On no account” is the pressure point. If justice can be suspended when you’re angry, then it was never justice, just good behavior on a good day.

The subtext is a rebuke to Athenian common sense, where honor culture and civic life were thick with reciprocity: friends repay favors, enemies repay blows. Socrates attacks that symmetry. Injury creates a narrative of entitlement (“after what he did to me”), and he treats that narrative as the seed of moral corruption. The phrase “however much we have suffered” anticipates every escalation logic ever: proportionality, deterrence, closure. He denies them all by insisting that wrongdoing can’t be laundered through victimhood.

Context matters: this is the Socrates of the trial and its aftermath, speaking as someone about to be punished by the state and betrayed by public opinion. The argument doubles as self-defense and indictment. If he retaliates against Athens, he validates the city’s view of him as a destabilizer; if he refuses retaliation, he forces the audience to confront a harsher possibility: that the real danger isn’t the gadfly but the crowd’s willingness to call vengeance “justice.” It’s moral absolutism deployed as civic critique, with his own body as the proof text.