“Rousseau created a new responsibility for evil; neither God nor man but human society.” — Ernst Cassirer Copy Share Image
“Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself… — Honore de Balzac Copy Share Image
“according to Montesquieu, the persons, the liberties, the property, mankind itself, are nothing but materials to exercise the sagacity of lawgivers." Rousseau.” — Frédéric Bastiat Copy Share Image
“Petulance is not wit, although a few grains of wit may be found in petulance; quartz is not gold, although a few… — Walter Savage Landor Copy Share Image
“It was part of Rousseau’s vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. ‘I feel too superior to hate.’ ‘I love… — Paul Johnson Copy Share Image
It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
“And we have seen how Rousseau’s insistence on creating a world that makes sense ultimately vitiates his attempt to educate a child… — Susan Neiman Copy Share Image
“The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a… — Niall Ferguson Copy Share Image
“Start with that. Chaos. No control, no law, no government at all. Like being in the arena. Where do we go from… — Suzanne Collins Copy Share Image
It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“For Rousseau, ‘the word finance is a slave’s word’ and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
“But, if strength of body be, with some show of reason, the boast of men, why are women so infatuated as to… — Mary Wollstonecraft Copy Share Image
“Rousseau declares, that a woman should never, for a moment feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise… — Mary Wollstonecraft Copy Share Image
For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing… — Gertrude Himmelfarb Copy Share Image
Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and… — Richard Mitchell Copy Share Image
“ The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same order,… — Jean-Jacques Rousseau Copy Share Image
“If I hit that tree with this stone, Rousseau says, all will go well in my life from now on. He throws… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“Since Voltaire and many other philosophes had become ardent champions of the partitioning overlords, Catherine and Frederick, Rousseau chose to become an… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“The fact that Man is Nature’s perverse instantiation can only lead to the appalling conclusion that Man, too, is some kind of… — Stephan Attia Copy Share Image
Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired… — Jacques Barzun Copy Share Image
Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set… — Russell Kirk Copy Share Image
“Nothing is harder than distinguishing in children between real stupidity and that apparent but misleading stupidity which simply indicates strength of character.… — Peter Gumbel Copy Share Image
“Rousseau alienated his aristocratic patrons; he quarrelled with most of his friends and well-wishers, including Hume and Diderot, many of whom also… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Rousseau.—Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social edifice rest upon the general will, no one has so… — Frédéric Bastiat Copy Share Image
“Henri Rousseau was a simple, poorly educated man with an air of innocent naïveté. The Montmartre crowd gave him the nickname “Le… — Will Gompertz Copy Share Image
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
