Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,- at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and are tinged with his mind. (...) An Englishman reads and says, "how English!" a German- "how Teutonic!" an Italian- "how Roman and how Greek!" As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal beauty that every body felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New England an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.

Emerson, Representative Men

  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.

Whitehead, Philosophy and Religion

   Cicero said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Zeus were to speak, he would use their language.

Plutarch, Cicero

   A man, whom the wicked have not the right even to praise.

Aristotle on Plato