"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"What wisdom can you find greater than kindness."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Every person has a right to risk their own life for the preservation of it."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, 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. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!"
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract and The Discourses)

"Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"Die Freiheit des Menschen liegt nicht darin, dass er tun kann, was er will, sondern dass er nicht tun muss, was er nicht will."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The truth brings no man a fortune."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"El hombre ha nacido libre y por doquiera se encuentra sujeto con cadenas."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Die Freiheit des Menschen liegt nicht darin, dass er tun kann, was er will, sondern, dass er nicht tun muss, was er nicht will."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our nature but knew it to the full, whose happiness was independent of ours, but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern, who would be content to wait in the fullness of time for a distant glory, and to labour in one age to enjoy the fruits in another. Gods would be needed to give men laws."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"La sociedad pervierte al ser humano."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. "
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Man is born free;but everywhere he is in chains."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Finance is a slave's word."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"A born king is a very rare being."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"We must powder our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless"
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Man’s first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"If force compels obedience, there is no need to invoke a duty to obey, and if force ceases to compel obedience, there is no longer any obligation."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"The truth brings no man a fortune."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

"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."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The more women want to resemble [men], the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be their masters."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"There is no evildoer who could not be made good for something. "
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right)

"The continual emotion that is felt in the theater excites us, enervates us, enfeebles us, and makes us less able to resist our passions. And the sterile interest taken in virtue serves only to satisfy our vanity without obliging us to practice it."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Politics and the Arts: Letter to M.D. Alembert on the Theatre)

"Every artists wants to be applauded"
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"My illusions about the world caused me to think that in order to benefit by my reading I ought to possess all the knowledge the book presupposed. I was very far indeed from imagining that often the author did not possess it himself, but had extracted it from other books, as and when he needed it. This foolish conviction forced me to stop every moment, and to rush incessantly from one book to another; sometimes before coming to the tenth page of the one I was trying to read I should, by this extravagant method, have had to run through whole libraries. Nevertheless I stuck to it so persistently that I wasted infinite time, and my head became so confused that I could hardly see or take in anything."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Confessions)

""Finance is a slave's word." "
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)