Quotes About Jean-Jacques Rousseau

there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is taking over. Its beginnings date back to the eighteenth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage.

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Fear animates all success addicts. As philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions, "I was not afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace; and that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything else in the world."[26] Can you relate to this?

However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted it, complaining that the rise of commerce expanded hierarchies of wealth that both morally enervated the rich and fed disorder, even if they left the poor better off.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm.

Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.

The institution of the state "bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich … fixed forever the laws of property and inequality; converted clever usurpation into inalienable right; and for the sake of a few ambitious men, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, servitude and misery." These are not Marx's words, but (as we have seen already) those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality.

The writings of women are always cold and pretty like themselves. There is as much wit as you may desire, but never any soul.

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated that states are formed by a social contract, a rational decision reached when people calculated their self-interest, came to the agreement that they would be better off in a state than in simpler societies, and voluntarily did away with their simpler societies. But

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.

He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) French philosopher and writer.

It makes me feel very much what I believe I have said in some work, that remorse sleeps during a prosperous fate and grows sour in adversity

As she put it, she knew of nothing so ravishing as having a child whom she could whip whenever she was in a bad mood. (The Queen Fantasque)

Among the notable books of later times-we may say, without exaggeration, of all time—must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Allowing that nature intended we should always enjoy good health, I dare almost affirm that a state of reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.

This collection of scattered thoughts and observations has little order or continuity; it was begun to give pleasure to a good mother who thinks for herself.

French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects.

Os discípulos de Jean-Jacques Rousseau que exultavam com a natureza e o estado paradisíaco do homem em seu estado natural não se deram conta do fato de que os meios de subsistência são escassos e que o estado natural do homem é a insegurança e a pobreza extrema.

Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all.

The main thrust of Burr's argument was that citizenship came from consent. Drawing on his favorite writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burr defended the basic premise of the social contract: citizens were not born, but made, through their participation in civil society. Gallatin