Quotes About Rousseau

In one of the papers he wrote for the All Souls fellowship, he referred to Rousseau's Confessions as "a lucid journal of a life so utterly degraded that it has been a bestseller in France ever since.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.

Wasting the valuable time of others, thought Rousseau, was a bureaucrat's ultimate revenge.

Rousseau's search might prove fruitless. Perhaps

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.

A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty

We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Rousseau's constant influence on later generations is indubitable (though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings.

We suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau's legacy is not so much the idea of the 'noble savage' as that of the 'stupid savage'. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth century Europeans, or at least we think we have, bit its not unusual to find even the very sophisticated comtempary thinkers who feel its appropriate to compare 'bands' of hunter gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they'd be likely to meet.

There have even been attempts to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Palaeolithic mammoth hunters (they both turn out to be very low).1 It's almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies 'everyone was equal, because they were all equally poor.

Let us emphasize (we really shouldn't have to) that Rousseau's effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and lost ages of freedom and equality were in no sense themselves responsible for the French Revolution.

Rousseau is] the person whom I most revere both for the Force of [his] Genius and the Greatness of [his] mind [...]

For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.

Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Thus the cerebral footings were laid. Voltaire preferred intellectual liberty and enlightened despotism. Montesquieu wanted limited monarchy and a separation of political powers. Rousseau dreamed of an ideal republican commonwealth.

Self-love makes more libertines than love.

Universality and rationality were the hallmarks of all these teachings. But very quickly culturewhich was for Kant and, speaking anachronistically, for Rousseau, singularbecame cultures.

In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates quest for man in general or man in himself.

Some authors have argued that a direct historical line can be drawn to Nazism from the French Revolution of 1789, the Jacobin 'Reign of Terror' in 1793-4, and the implicit idea of a popular dictatorship in Rousseau's theory of the 'General Will', decided initially by the people but brooking no opposition once resolved upon.139

We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

For I showed men how they were the cause of their own unhappiness and, in consequence, how they might avoid it', writes Rousseau to Voltaire in his famous letter on the Lisbon disaster, laying the foundations of a new spirit that desacralizes nature, removing it from divine will and entrusting it to the hands of man.

There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau: to give them more money or to restrain their desires.

Rousseau created a new responsibility for evil; neither God nor man but human society.