Daily Inspiration Quote by Plato

Plato’s jab lands because it flatters piety while skewering politics. “The gods’ service is tolerable” sounds like a concession to religion, but it’s really a comparison trap: divine demands, however austere, at least claim a stable order. It’s the human middlemen - rulers, demagogues, bureaucrats, even public opinion - who make obedience feel degrading, petty, and endless. The line turns on a brutally simple insight: servitude is not just about what you surrender, but to whom you surrender it. Serving a god can be imagined as aligning with justice itself; serving a man too often means feeding someone else’s appetite.

The subtext is classic Platonic suspicion of the civic world. In Athens, “service” to men came packaged as democratic virtue: sit on juries, follow the Assembly, defer to generals, perform the rituals of citizenship. Plato watched those mechanisms convict Socrates, and he never stopped treating the city’s moral confidence as a dangerous hallucination. So the phrase “man’s intolerable” isn’t whining; it’s an indictment of power without wisdom. Human authorities are contingent, biased, and prone to turning public duty into personal domination.

It also works rhetorically because it weaponizes hierarchy. Plato doesn’t argue against service; he reassigns it upward. If you must submit, submit to what is beyond ego. Read that way, the quote isn’t anti-religion so much as anti-humiliation: the intolerable part is being ruled by someone no better than you, pretending to be your betters.