Currency Quote by Colin Wilson

“It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies…

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

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

— Alain de Botton

“For Rousseau, ‘the word finance is a slave’s word’ and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce reigns. ‘Financial…

— Pankaj Mishra

“Meanwhile, two other great currents in political thought, had a decisive significance on the development of socialist ideas: Liberalism, which had powerfully stimulated advanced…

— Rudolf Rocker

“according to Montesquieu, the persons, the liberties, the property, mankind itself, are nothing but materials to exercise the sagacity of lawgivers." Rousseau.”

— Frédéric Bastiat

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

— Daniel Silva

“Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put…

— Tom Reiss

“Contra Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau refused to believe that the obligations to civil society could be derived from self-interest, the preservation of life or…

— Pankaj Mishra

Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from…

— Russell Kirk

“What’s crucial about Rousseau, and many of his ideological successors, is that politics was always personal for him, unlike those whom Tocqueville faulted for…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between…

— Niall Ferguson

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we…

— Randall Jarrell