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About this quote

What does it mean?
Extreme wealth leads to laziness, extreme poverty to vice, and both cause unhappiness.
In plain terms
Too much money makes you lazy, too little makes you mean, and both make you unhappy.
What can you take from it?
Balance in wealth prevents moral decay and discontent.

Where it applies

  • economic policy
  • class dynamics
  • personal finance

Putting it to work

  • wealth redistribution
  • community support

Questions to consider

  • Is middle class better for character?
  • How does money change behavior?

Another view

Some argue wealth can fund philanthropy instead of causing vice.

More from Plato

  1. Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

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  2. The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.

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  3. The judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others: …

    Permalink to quote #33

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