Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

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

The general will is always upright and always tends to the public advantage; but the deliberations of the people do not always have the same rectitude.

The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Nature has made man happy and good, but society corrupts him and makes him miserable.

Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body.

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

We are born weak, we need strength; we are born entirely unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when grown up is given us by education.

Man is naturally good, and it is from our institutions alone that men become wicked.

The most useful and honorable science is that of man.

To live is not to breathe, it is to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

The right of the strongest is no right at all.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die from its birth, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction.

The people, being subject to the laws, ought to be the author of them.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.

The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family.

Force does not create right, and we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.