The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government is to live under the government of worse men.
Plato (c.428-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Republic, Book 1, 347c
In Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Eloquence," Society and Solitude (1870).
Alt. trans.:More discussion here.
- "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
- The Constitution Party (1952-68) used on their letterhead the variant, "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
- "The price of apathy is to be ruled by evil men."
- "Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
In context (Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 [tr. Shorey (1969)]):[346e] "Then, Thrasymachus, is not this immediately apparent, that no art or office provides what is beneficial for itself -- but as we said long ago it provides and enjoins what is beneficial to its subject, considering the advantage of that, the weaker, and not the advantage the stronger? That was why, friend Thrasymachus, I was just now saying that no one of his own will chooses to hold rule and office and take other people's troubles in hand to straighten them out, but everybody expects pay for that, [347a] because he who is to exercise the art rightly never does what is best for himself or enjoins it when he gives commands according to the art, but what is best for the subject. That is the reason, it seems, why pay must be provided for those who are to consent to rule, either in form of money or honor or a penalty if they refuse." "What do you mean by that, Socrates?" said Glaucon. "The two wages I recognize, but the penalty you speak of and described as a form of wage I don't understand." "Then," said I, "you don't understand the wages of the best men [347b] for the sake of which the finest spirits hold office and rule when they consent to do so. Don't you know that to be covetous of honor and covetous of money is said to be and is a reproach?" "I do," he said. "Well, then," said I, "that is why the good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor. They do not wish to collect pay openly for their service of rule and be styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth from their office and be called thieves, nor yet for the sake of honor, [347c] for they are not covetous of honor. So there must be imposed some compulsion and penalty to constrain them to rule if they are to consent to hold office. That is perhaps why to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves [347d] or to their like. For we may venture to say that, if there should be a city of good men only, immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly contended for as office is now, and there it would be made plain that in very truth the true ruler does not naturally seek his own advantage but that of the ruled; so that every man of understanding would rather choose to be benefited by another than to be bothered with benefiting him. "
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Time for another “State of the WIST” post. I last ran this report in December 2021, so this is more of a 3-quarter update than annual.
I’ve been pretty consistent about getting new quotes loaded in over the past year — my goal is 5-6 quotes posted per weekday. A gradually increasing number of quotes in my backlog turn out to be ones that I already have in the system, in which case, if I end up making substantive improvements (finding the sourcing, adding notes, expanding alternate translations), I count that upgrade as a “new” quote in my head for purposes doing my quotational duty (even if it doesn’t actually add to the “count,” doesn’t show up on the front page, and doesn’t go into my RSS feed).
What’s happened over here since last time?
Some changes that took place on the WordPress site the past year:
Did a sweep through of some authors whose citations were all sorts of whacky-inconsistent. This often uncovered duplicates, which I cleaned out (more on that below).
The tool I used to automatically mirror posts on this site (both new and upgraded) to my Diaspora* site has stopped working, so for the time being I am doing that manually (it adds a couple of minutes to each post).
Feedburner finally shut down.
Took concrete steps toward getting the theme updated to be responsive to different sized screens (more below).
Doing the Numbers
Let’s look at the numbers:
Quotation counts
So continued progress, despite some housecleaning.
Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):
Author and Quotes Graph
Limited Return to Office time does help keep those numbers up.
Note that, as always, all of these quotations are personally curated to some degree or another — digging out citations and online links when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.
I currently stand at 685 quotes flagged as meme/visual quotations. That number’s gone up a bit since last year, though slowly; I generate one of these every few weeks.
Top Authors
Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?
Top quoted authors
As the numbers get higher, it’s harder folk to do more than shuffle around, esp. barring I find any massive new source of quotations. Nobody was added this year to the list, or dropped, just adjusted in rank — Jefferson and Lewis swapped position, as they had in the 12/2021 list.
The actual quote count for Emerson, Shakespeare, and Shaw actually went down, as I did a clean-up of duplicates I had of them.
This table is more for curiosity’s sake than any real meaning, showing not just how prolific these folk are, but how interested I am in recording things these individuals said.
The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors“).
Top Quotations
Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations Ever (with how they’ve changed since last December 2021). I find these interesting, since it’s not driven anything I do, but page hits by visitors:
– (10,505, was 9,374) John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
– (6,743, was 6,464) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)]
– (6,288, was 6,177) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
– (5,716, was 5,476) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
– (4,972, was 4,938) John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962)
↑ (4,910, was 4,512) Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981)
↑ (4,678, was 4,008) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
↓ (4,649 was 4,590) William Hazlitt, “On The Conduct of Life” (1822)
♥ (4,407, new on list) Plato, Republic, Book 1, 347c
– (4,346, was 3,947) Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)
Some actual movement here, with the Lebowitz and Rilke quotes that entered the Top 10 last time rising in the standings, at the expense of pushing Hazlitt down and sadly losing a long-standing and fine James Baldwin quote.
Over 2022 to date, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:
↑ 933 views – Plato — Republic, Book 1, 347c
– 857 views – Galbraith, John Kenneth — “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
↑ 700 views – Aristotle — (Attributed)
♥ 676 views – Homer — The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 6, l. 180ff (6.180) [Odysseus to Nausicaa] (c. 700 BC) [tr. Rieu (1946)]
↑ 645 views – Sa’adi — Poem on Humanity
↓ 589 views – Rilke, Rainer Maria — Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
↑ 495 views – Franz Kafka — Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 Jan 1904)
♥ 388 views – Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics [Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια] (c. 325 BC) (paraphrase)
↓ 347 views – Lamb, Charles — “The Two Races of Men,” Essays of Elia (1823)
↓ 346 views – Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981)
Dropping from the list were a Voltaire, and one of the few “Other” quotes to previously rank this high (it came out at #11 for the period).
Several, but by no means all, of the above have a graphic image / meme associated with them on their page, and many are the overall Top 10 list. But a few are new to the list this year; the Homer (which was added this year) and the second Aristotle (which I did updates on).
Who Are You People?
As Google Analytics gets more complex, figuring out old simplistic stats becomes a bit more difficult. As far as I can tell, though compared to the end of 2021, I am getting 128 visitors / day (vs 127) and 168 pages visited / day (vs 151). So traffic is fairly stable, despite mobile data downchecks from Google (see below).
Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter (143 followers, up from 134). I have 69 contacts on my Diaspora* mirror (up from 50), and I actually get some good engagement over there with likes and discussion.
Those numbers aren’t huge, by any means — but this is a labor of love, and it’s nice to see that some folk are finding it of use and/or interest.
Gender (identified in 32% of visitors), splits 51-49 female-male. For age (identified in 30% of visitors), the 18-24 visitors are 28% (college papers, I assume), 25-34 cohort is 20%, 35-44 is 17%, 45-54 is 14%, 55-64 and 65+ cohorts are about 10%.
Not surprisingly, for language the vast majority (82%) of visitors to WIST.info are flagged as one flavor or another of English-speaker, with the US (65%) and UK (13%) topping the list (about where they were last December). From a national representation (where users were so identified), 53% were from the US, 7% from the UK, 5% from India, another 5% from Canada, and 2% from Australia.
Browser-wise, Chrome retains the lead at 55%, with Safari at 27%, Edge and Firefox just about 5% each. That’s interesting to cross-reference with OS, where Windows is 33% of the users, iOS and Mac each another 20%, and Android at 19%. The iOS and Android numbers are interesting, given my site’s “unfriendliness” to mobile users (see below). None of those numbers have changed substantially since 2021.
The Year Ahead
The biggest plan I have for WIST in the next few months is that I’ve hired someone to put in a responsive theme. Google is consistently (and not without justification) dinging my rankings because my site is “unfriendly” to mobile users (text too small, links too close together, etc.). A responsive theme will adjust the display automatically for different sized screens (PC vs mobile, for example).
The complexity here is that I have highly customized my post display (post titles as citation titles, e.g.), which means it can’t just be done out of the box, and, honestly, it exceeds my own limited programming ability. So I’m going to be hiring someone from outside to make it happen. I have a project requirements document prepared, I’ve had one failed attempt on UpWork … let’s see if I can get it done.
Other goals?
Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again. Maybe do some tag cleanup (there are some that are redundant — plural vs singular) and others where I’ve inadvertently concatenated terms).
Continue making some author sweeps to normalize how some works are organized.
Continue work on parallel translations of foreign works.
And that’s the end of the Q3 report for 2022. See you next time I get an urge to do this!
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Time for another “State of the WIST” post. I last ran this report in September 2022; time flies when you’re having fun. I’ve been pretty…
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