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

Categorized in : People Long Men

People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

innocence evil people

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

your-side four stories

Freedom is the power to choose our own chains

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

chains

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

humorous inspirational life

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

liberty freedom political

Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

should heart

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

educational stupid men

The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

doe want lying

The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived it longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

he-man men life

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body; which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

passion men two

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

treats morality people

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

men war believe

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

paradox prejudice men

Do you not know...that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

taught wise children

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

wisdom kindness inspirational

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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

race evil civilization

No one is happy unless he respects himself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

self-respect ethics respect

Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they are telling you their true thoughts.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

mistaken judgment firsts

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

rocks giving years

Education is either from nature, from man or from things. The developing of our faculties and organs is the education of nature; that of man is the application we learn to make of this very developing; and that of things is the experience we acquire in regard to the different objects by which we are affected. All that we have not at our birth, and that we stand in need of at the years of maturity, is the gift of education.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

maturity education inspirational