“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.”

Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?

I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society’s fault.

If force compels obedience, there is no need to invoke a duty to obey, and if force ceases to compel obedience, there is no longer any obligation.

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

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!

My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.

My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.

I am a hundred times happier in my solitude than I could be if I lived among them.

In respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.

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 and political.

Oh, man! Live your own life and no longer be wretched!

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

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

A theory deeply etched in our law is that a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.

A man with a club is a law-maker.

The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

The job of a judge is to figure out what the law says, not what he wants it to say. There is a difference between the role of a judge and that of a policy maker… Judging requires a certain impartiality.

A law against hating Jews is usually the beginning of the end for the Jews.