Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech.

And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.