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Jean Jacques Rousseau

1712 AD — 1778 AD

Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.

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06Undated
The majesty of Scripture strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel has its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers; with all their pomp of diction, how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truths are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.
Jean Jacques Rousseau / quote
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11Undated
No government, however efficient, was morally justified unless it rested on the active participation of all its citizens. Thus reason and morality do not exist in the state by nature; they are products of civil society. The desire to have cake and eat it too is as old as human nature. Social order is a sacred right. Men are not natural enemies. You cannot corrupt the people, but you often can deceive them. In a well-governed state they are a few criminals. Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests in public affairs; and the abuse of laws by the government is a lesser evil than the corruption of the legislative authority, which is the inevitable result of particular opinions. When all this occurs, the substance of the state changes, and all reforms become impossible. … In the strict sense of the term, there never has been, and there never will be, a real democracy. The tyrant is one who presumes, in defiance of the law, to rule in accordance with the law; the despot is one who places himself above the law itself.
Jean Jacques Rousseau / quote
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17Undated
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 an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.
Jean Jacques Rousseau / quote
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