[T]he mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete....

[T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.

Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.

Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold...

To renounce freedom is to renounce one’s humanity, one’s rights as a man and equally one’s duties.

If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.

I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth...

Ah,’ thought the king sadly, shrugging his shoulders, “I see clearly that if one has a crazy wife, one cannot avoid being a fool.'(“Queen Fantasque”)

Liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and...

I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least...

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

Being wealthy isn’t just a question of having lots of money. It’s a question of what we want. Wealth isn’t an absolute, it’s relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can’t afford,...

Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.

Renunciar a la libertad es renunciar a la condición de hombre.

Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence...

Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their...

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing.

Het nietsontziende despotisme van de huidige maatschappij heeft volstrekt niets van doen met de zachtaardige gezagsuitoefenng van een vader, die meer gericht is op het voordeel van degeen die gehoorzaamt dan op het nut voor...

Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different...

[When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable...

I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all...

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

I am not worried about pleasing clever minds or fashionable people. In every period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century, their country, and their society. For that...

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many...

All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted…without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of...

I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom...

Even the soberest judged it requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to ensure the other, as a man, dangerously wounded in any of his limbs, readily parts with it to save the rest...

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

L’harmonie, me disait-il, n’est qu’un accessoire éloigné dans la musique imitative; il n’y a dans l’harmonie proprement dite aucun principe d’imitation. Elle assure, il est vrai, les intonations; elle porte témoignage de leur justesse; et,...

The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods...

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: ‘If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are...

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence....

When I stay in one Place, I can hardly think at all; my body had to be on the move to set my mind going.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave...

What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil...

I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence;...

…an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of...

But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people…

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

Europe had fallen back into the barbarity of the first ages. People from this part of world, so enlightened today, lived a few centuries ago in a state worse than ignorance. Some sort of learned...

How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being...