Equality, because without it there can be no liberty.

The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.

The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.

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

War is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies, inasmuch as it is impossible to fix a true relation between things of different natures.