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

Trust your heart rather than your head.

The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.

Nothing on this earth is worth buying at the price of human blood.

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

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.

A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.

Girls should learn that so much finery is only put on to hide defects, and that the triumph of beauty is to shine by itself.

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

We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children.

Alas, it is when we are beginning to leave this mortal body that it most offends us!

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

I have never thought, for my part, that man’s freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.

It is a great evil for a Chief of a nation to be born the enemy of the freedom whose defender he should be.

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?

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.

Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

The state is the servant of the citizen, and not his master.

I’m tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.

So long as freedom from hunger is only half achieved, so long as two thirds of the nations have food deficits, no citizen, no nation can afford to be satisfied.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.