“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”
“I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.”
“Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.”
“Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.”
“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
Source: The Social Contract and Discourses
“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”
Variant translation: It is too difficult to think nobly when one only thinks to get a living.
Source: Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Books II-VI, II
Source: Confessions
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
“I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.”
Source: Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Book I, I
Context: I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.
“The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty”
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Book I
Context: I love liberty, and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances. As long as my purse contains money it secures my independence, and exempts me from the trouble of seeking other money, a trouble of which I have always had a perfect horror; and the dread of seeing the end of my independence, makes me proportionately unwilling to part with my money. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.
“All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.”
“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
Source: Emile or On Education
“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”
“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”
Often attributed to Stalin and Marx, according to the book, They Never Said It (1989), p. 64, the phrase derives from a rumour that Lenin said this to one of his close associates, Grigori Zinoviev, not long after a meeting of the Politburo in the early 1920s, but there is no evidence that he ever did. It has also been believed that Lenin may have expressed that the profit motive cannot be undone in that "If we were to hang the last capitalist, another would suddenly appear to sell us the rope". Experts on the Soviet Union reject the rope quote as spurious. However, it is established that Lenin did remark on the same underlying theme (even if not in reference to rope), namely, that capitalists in their addiction to high profits could not help themselves from selling things to a socialist state, even if it was against their own long-term interests by strengthening an enemy; Edvard Radzinsky covers it in his discussion of Lenin's comments on the "deaf-mutes" in Radzinsky's biography of Stalin.
Misattributed
