Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Quotes by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

• Everything is perfect coming from the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

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• Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.

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• Censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration.

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• The Catholic must adopt the decision handed down to him; the Protestant must learn to decide for himself.

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• It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.

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• The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

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• The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct.

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• Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.

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• Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

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• Men always love what is good or what they find good; it is in judging what is good that they go wrong.

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• The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction.

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• The happiest is he who suffers the least pain; the most miserable, he who enjoys the least pleasure.

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• General and abstract ideas are the source of the greatest errors of mankind.

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• Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

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• Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.

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• To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

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• The man who has lived the longest is not he who has spent the greatest number of years, but he who has had the greatest sensibility of life.

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• From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live.

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• Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

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• Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

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