Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

A child who is spoiled is a child who is unhappy.

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

Trust your heart rather than your head.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

The right of voting is the right of self-government.

Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to save it.

What is called liberty is the right to do anything that harms no one else.

Let us then, in the first place, lay down as an incontestable maxim that the first impulses of nature are always right.

A nation can only be happy when it has a good government, and a good government can only be had when the people are well educated.

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.

The greatest revolutions are not those which change empires, but those which change the hearts of men.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

The general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct.

The most dangerous of all sentiments is the one which makes us say, 'It's none of my business.'

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.

The savage lives within himself; the social man lives always outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others.

The world is the book of women.

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