Sayings of Socrates 22

If you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Meletus and Anytus will not injure me. They cannot, for it is not in the nature of things that a bad man should injure one better than himself. 

I do not deny that he may, perhaps, kill him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and he may imagine, and others may imagine, that he is doing him a great injury. But in that I do not agree with him; for the evil of doing what Anytus is doing—of unjustly taking away another man's life—is greater far.

—Plato, Apology 30c–d