The public themselves, he says, are the real sophists and the most complete and thorough educators.

No private education can hold out against the irresistible force of public opinion and the ordinary moral standards of society.
But that makes it all the more essential that public opinion and social environment should not be left to grow up at haphazard as they ordinarily do, but should be made by the wise legislator the expression of the good and be informed in all their details by his knowledge.

The legislator is the only possible teacher of virtue.
Such a programme for a treatise on government might lead us to expect in the Politics mainly a description of a Utopia or ideal state which might inspire poets or philosophers but have little direct effect upon political institutions.

Plato's Republic is obviously impracticable, for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics.

He has no proposals, in that dialogue at least, for making the best of things as they are.