As I say, then, cookery is flattery disguised as medicine; and cosmetics is disguised as gymnastics in the same way – crooked, deceptive, mean, slavish, deceiving by shaping, colouring, smoothing, dressing, making people assume a beauty which is not their own, and neglecting the beauty of their own which would come through gymnastics. […] As cosmetics is to gymnastics, so is sophistry to legislation, and as cookery is to medicine, so is rhetoric to justice.

Plato, Gorgias 465b


Added to diary 15 January 2018