GORGIAS: Speech is a powerful ruler ... and inspired incantations through speeches are inducers of pleasure and reducers of sorrow; by intercourse with the mind's belief, the power of the incantation enchants and persuades and moves it by sorcery (32). Thus we see the power of persuasive language and its means to empower people. Our knowledge is always partial, always relative to the time and place in which we live, and always "changing" because of changes wrought in the human mind and disposition by Persuasion (31).
PLATO: Such speech is typical of rhetorical thinking! It is anathema to me! Rhetoric is a producer of persuasion, and has therein its whole business and main consummation (54).
GORGIAS: That is so.
PLATO: And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe (55).
GORGIAS: In this case it does follow.
PLATO: Then there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know (58). This kind of orator is able to persuade people that he knows things he does not know and appear to be virtuous when he is not.
ISOCRATES: My good man, I do not claim to teach virtue, but oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment (37).
PLATO: Yours is a relative truth, then, and not an absolute. The orators who do what they think fit in their cities, and the despots, will find they have got no good in doing that, if indeed power is, as you say, a good, but doing what one thinks fit without intelligence is ... an evil (63). It is dangerous to have only a little knowledge, and great harm can come thereby.
