Daily Inspiration Quote by Plato

Even in translation, Plato lands the jab with the casual precision of someone who knows language is never neutral. “They certainly give very strange names to diseases” is the kind of offhand line that sounds like small talk until you notice what it’s really doing: casting suspicion on the authority that comes bundled with technical vocabulary. The “they” is doing heavy lifting. It points not at sickness itself but at the people empowered to define it - physicians, specialists, the credentialed class whose naming practices can turn messy human experience into something that feels legible, orderly, and therefore governable.

Plato’s deeper target is sophistry-by-terminology: the way a fancy label can masquerade as understanding. In the dialogues, he repeatedly worries about words drifting away from reality, becoming tools of persuasion rather than instruments of truth. Medical terms make an ideal example because they sit at the intersection of life-and-death stakes and professional gatekeeping. If the name is “strange,” it hints at a gap between ordinary perception and expert discourse - a gap that can be either necessary (precision) or exploitative (mystification).

The humor also contains a quiet political theory. Naming is power: to name an illness is to decide what counts as normal, what counts as deviant, who deserves care, and who gets blamed. Plato isn’t mocking medicine so much as reminding you that expertise can hide behind its own diction, and that citizens should stay alert when knowledge starts to sound like incantation.