Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead.

The saying expresses an extreme valuation of education: learning is portrayed not as a minor advantage but as a qualitative transformation that makes a person fully “alive” in intellect and civic capacity. In this view, education awakens reason, judgment, and the ability to participate meaningfully in communal life, while lack of education leaves one inert—guided by impulse, custom, or others’ authority. The stark comparison also functions rhetorically, urging investment in paideia (formation through learning) by shaming ignorance as a kind of social and mental death. Even if not authentically Aristotelian, it aligns with a classical Greek tendency to link education with virtue and effective citizenship.