Dear Monika: The famous quote is in the Apology 38

Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your
For wherever he goes
he must speak out.
tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one
will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making

you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that to do

as you say would be a disobedience to the God, and therefore

that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am

38a
serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse about virtue,

and of those other things about which you hear me examining

myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the

unexamined life is not worth living, you are still less likely to

believe me. Yet I say what is true, although a thing of which it

is hard for me to persuade you. Also, I have never been

accustomed to think that I deserve to suffer any harm. Had I

money I might have estimated the offence at what I was able to

pay, and not have been much the worse. But I have none, and

38b
therefore I must ask you to proportion the fine to my means.

Well, perhaps I could afford a mina, and therefore I propose

that penalty: Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my

friends here, bid me say thirty minae, and they will be the

sureties. Let thirty minae be the penalty; for which sum they

38c
will be ample security to you.