Quotes About Rousseau

Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.

In a sense, all political use of Nietzsche is a perversion of his teaching. Nevertheless, what he said was read by political men and inspired them. He is as little responsible for fascism as Rousseau is responsible for Jacobinism. This means, however, that he is as much responsible for fascism as Rousseau was for Jacobinism.

The presence of cats exercises such a magic influence upon highly organized men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom...have been the favorite animal of a Mahommed, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.

Rousseau (I'll note with your permission) Could not conceive how solemn Grimm Dared clean his nails in front of him, The madcap sage and rhetorician. Champion of rights and liberty, In this case judged wrong-headedly. One still can be a man of action And mind the beauty of one's nails: Why fight the age's predilection? Custom's a despot and prevails.

Though it may be the peculiar happiness of Socrates and other geniuses of his stamp, to reason themselves into virtue, the human species would long ago have ceased to exist, had it depended entirely for its preservation on the reasonings of the individuals that compose it. Par 1, 36

The imagination which causes so many ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of savages Pt.1, 41

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

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

But without Rousseau's pessimistic approach to history and without his doctrine of the depravity of the present, the nineteenth-century novel of disillusionment is just as inconceivable as the conception of tragedy held by Schiller, Kleist, and Hebbel.

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?

It's no devil,' I said. 'And why do you say that?' she asked again, as if we hadn't discussed this before. 'Because,' I said, 'the Devil has more important things to do if he exists at all, and on the point of his existence at all I am not certain.' 'Where did you get an idea there was no Devil?' 'Rousseau,' I said. 'His philosophy argues that the worst evil is in man.

Rousseau pensaba que era bueno estar solo a veces y que quizá nuestras naturalezas florecían con la máxima pureza en esas ocasiones.

The nineteenth century faced an ambiguous legacy. On one side was civil society theory, teaching that human society makes men better. On the other stood Rousseau, proclaiming that it makes them worse.

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.

in 1762, Rousseau argued that puberty had such fundamental emotional and mental effects that it represented "a second birth.

As Talmon writes, 'When a regime is by definition regarded as realizing rights and freedoms, the citizen becomes deprived of any right to complain that he is being deprived of his rights and liberties.'21 Whereas English liberty set limits to the state, French liberty was to be imposed by the state. If need be, said Rousseau, we must force people to be free.

The noble savage Rousseau described, however, was an ideal—an abstraction, archetypal and religious—and not the flesh-and-blood reality he supposed.

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

In Europe, it's a done deal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism and the "panopticon" of his surveillance state.

Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.

Modern Protestants who urge us to believe in God, for the most part, despise the old 'proofs', and base their faith upon some aspect of human nature—emotions of awe or mystery, the sense of right and wrong, the feeling of aspiration, and so on. This way of defending religious belief was invented by Rousseau. It has become so familiar that his originality may easily not be appreciated by a modern reader, unless he will take the trouble to compare Rousseau with (say) Descartes or Leibniz.

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.

Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.

Rousseau.—Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social edifice rest upon the general will, no one has so completely admitted the hypothesis of the entire passiveness of human nature in the presence of the lawgiver:— "If