A quotation from Gorgias
Quotation
Speech is a powerful lord, which with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes the most divine works.
Philosophical Context
ClassicalGorgias
The sophist who argued that nothing exists, and that if it did, no one could know it, and if they could, no one could say it.
Gorgias came from Sicily to Athens as an ambassador and dazzled the city with a new power: persuasion as an art. He took no fixed doctrine, charged high fees, and showed that a skilled speaker could argue any side of any question. His little treatise On Non-Being runs a chain of arguments to three impossible conclusions: nothing exists, the existent cannot be known, the known cannot be communicated. The performance is half logic, half dare. Plato made him the foil of a dialogue and spent a career answering the unsettling idea that rhetoric might matter more than truth.
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What does Gorgias mean by this quotation?
The sophist who argued that nothing exists, and that if it did, no one could know it, and if they could, no one could say it. Gorgias came from Sicily to Athens as an ambassador and dazzled the city with a new power: persuasion as an art. He took no fixed doctrine, charged high fees, and showed that a skilled speaker could argue any side of any…