If there were a people consisting of gods, they would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable to men.

Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.

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

The general will is always right.

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

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.

Each member of the community gives himself to it at the instant of its constitution, just as he actually is, himself and all his forces, including all goods in his possession.