"I wish that you would tell me at what, in your opinion, the legislator should aim? "Hear me, then: there are two mother forms of states from which the rest may be truly said to be derived; and one of them may be called monarchy and the other democracy: the Persians have the highest form of the one, and we of the other; almost all the rest, as I was saying, are variations of these. Now, if you are to have liberty and the combination of friendship with wisdom, you must have both these forms of government in a measure; the argument emphatically declares that no city can be well governed which is not made up of both."

[Plato continues to point out that a workable democracy can only consist of educated persons, and if so, then no fatal harm would come.]