Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Social contract theory
Sayings by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The progress of the sciences and arts has done nothing to improve morals.
No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
The most dangerous method of doing evil is to do good under false pretenses.
Laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing.
It is from the bosom of the most perfect equality that the most monstrous despotism arises.
The general will is the constant will of all the members of the State; it is by it that they are citizens and free.
What is called virtue in a man is a weakness in a woman.
The child who has learned only what is taught him by others, will never be truly learned.
It is precisely because the force of things always tends to destroy equality that the force of legislation must always tend to maintain it.
Luxury, which nourishes a hundred poor people in our cities, starves ten thousand in the countryside.
All my misfortunes come from my having loved too much.
The greatest danger for a woman is to be too beautiful.
Man is naturally good, and it is only through institutions that he becomes bad.
The people's good is the supreme law.
It is less difficult to acquire virtue than to preserve it.
To be well governed, a state must be small.
The most useful and least advanced of all human knowledge seems to me to be that of man.
The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him.
To be truly free, we must be free from dependence on the opinions of others.
The less men know, the more they believe.