Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good."

"I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know."

"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."

"Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces."

"We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children."

"Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?"

"[T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal."

"Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves."

"Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse."

"The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!"

"Liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them."

"Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak."

"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?"

"A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need."

"Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing."

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

"I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different."

"I am not worried about pleasing clever minds or fashionable people. In every period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century, their country, and their society. For that very reason, a freethinker or philosopher today would have been nothing but a fanatic at the time of the League.* One must not write for such readers, if one wishes to live beyond one’s own age."

"She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her"

"A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty"