Quotes from Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

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

Each State can have for enemies only other States, and not men; for between things disparate in nature there can be no real relation.

Old men grasp more at life than babies, and leave it with a much worse grace than young people. It is because all their labours having been for this life, they perceive at last their trouble lost.

Do we wish men to be virtuous? Then let us begin by making them love their country.

Youth is the time to study wisdom; old age is the time to practice it.

Who does not sufficiently hate vice, does not sufficiently love virtue.

If you have but a single ruler, you lie at the discretion of a master who has no reason to love you: and if you have several, you must bear at once their tyranny and their divisions.

The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.

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

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.