The Clouds Morality Quotes

Here, Strepsiades makes his moral frailty even more explicit by referring to himself as a deadbeat. That's pretty harsh… but apparently fairly accurate, we're afraid.

Hmm, this time it's Socrates who comes off as the slow learner, since Strepsiades feels the need to remind him yet again what his sole goal is in coming to the Thinkery. Socrates might imagine that he has loftier intellectual pursuits, but Strepsiades is crystal-clear about just how self-serving and non-lofty his own are.

Better Argument is trying to argue for his own school of thought, which is all about things like "truth" and "decency" (which seem to be absolute goods for him). He's pitting these values against those of Worse Argument, who basically teaches people how to argue for what they want, regardless of how inherently moral their desires are.