This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. … - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.

Öğrencinize hiçbir şekilde sözlü ders vermeyin; o, derslerin yalnızca deneyimini almalıdır; ona hiçbir türlü ceza da vermeyin, çünkü kabahatli olmanın ne olduğunu bilmez; ona hiçbir zaman af diletmeyin, çünkü o sizi kırmayı beceremez. Eylemlerinde her türlü ahlak anlayışından yoksun olduğundan, ahlak açısından kötü olan ve ne cezayı ne de azarlanmayı gerektiren hiçbir şey yapamaz.

"Lacking valid reasons to justify himself and sufficient strength to defend himself, easily crushing an individual, but himself crushed by gangs of bandits, alone against everyone and, because of mutual jealousies, unable to join with his equals against an enemy united by a common hope of pillage, the rich man, hard pressed by necessity, eventually conceived the most cleverly designed project which has ever entered the human mind. That was to use to his advantage the very forces of those who were attacking him, to turn his enemies into his defenders, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other institutions which were as beneficial to him as natural right was against him. With this in mind, after showing his neighbours the horror of a situation which armed them all against the others, which made their possessions as onerous as their needs, and in which no one found his security either in poverty or in wealth, he easily came up with specious reasons to lead them to his goal. "Let us unite," he said to them, "to protect the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and to assure to each man the possession of what belongs to him. Let us set up rules of justice and peace to which everyone is obliged to conform, which do not exempt any one, and which in some way make up for the whims of fortune, by subjecting the powerful and the weak equally to mutual obligations. In a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us collect them into one supreme power which governs us according to wise laws and which protects and defends all the members of the association, repels common enemies, and keeps us in an eternal harmony." He required much less than the equivalent of this speech to convince crude and easily seduced men, who, in addition, had too many things to disentangle among themselves to be able to go without arbitrators and too much avarice and ambition to be able to do without masters for any length of time. They all rushed headlong into