The beginning of my philosophy

I just posted (below) an excerpt from Plato's Republic. This particular passage had a profound effect on me when I was young (my first reading of the republic was probably around 10 years old, something I'll write of another time), it resonated off of not only the religious precepts I had become acquainted with (From Evangelical Christianity though to to Jewish teachings and off to Buddhism) but the scientific ones I was meeting as well. It is the only part of the Republic that really stayed with me. A few years later I would read an update of this in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House 5 and an important link between past and present would be completed for me.