Daily Inspiration Quote by Protagoras

Democracy’s dirty secret is that it can’t afford to be picky about who gets to speak. Protagoras, the sophist with a salesman’s ear for civic anxiety, flatters Athens while quietly tightening the screws: if political judgment is a specialized craft, the polis collapses into oligarchy by definition. So Athens is “right” to hear advice from anyone not because every citizen is wise, but because the city’s legitimacy depends on treating civic competence as broadly distributed.

The line smuggles in Protagoras’ most radical premise: political virtue is not like shipbuilding. You can’t outsource it to experts without undoing the very thing you’re trying to preserve. “Incumbent on everyone” is doing heavy ideological work. It recasts participation as obligation, not privilege; silence becomes a kind of civic delinquency. In a culture that prized public speech, Protagoras is also laundering rhetoric into ethics: to deliberate is to be excellent, or at least to practice excellence.

Context matters. In 5th-century Athens, after the Persian Wars and amid imperial ambition, democracy was both proud and paranoid, attacked by aristocratic critics who saw the Assembly as mob rule. Protagoras answers them with a pragmatic moral theory: cities are possible only if ordinary people can be educated into judgment, and only if we act as though they already have the right to try. The subtext is less kumbaya than survivalist: shared “excellence” isn’t lofty idealism; it’s the minimum operating system of a functioning polis.