[T]here isn't now, hasn't been in the past, nor ever will be in the future anyone with a character so unusual that he has been educated to virtue in spite of the contrary education he received from the mob--I mean, a human character; the divine, as the saying goes, is an exception to the rule. You should realize that if anyone is saved and becomes what he ought to be under our present constitutions, he has been saved--you may rightly say--by a divine dispensation.
Plato, Republic Book VI, 492e (Grube-Reeve translation).
