As soon as anyone says of the affairs of the state ‘What do I care?’, the state may be given up for lost. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong...it is only when we haggle with conscience that we have recourse to the subtleties of argument

There is, I feel, an age at which an individual man would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that portend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time.

Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile? Is it not that he thereby returns to his primitive state, and that, while the animal which has acquired nothing and which also has nothing to lose, always retains its instinct, man, in losing through old age or other accidents all that his perfectibility has enabled him to acquire, thus falls even lower than the animal itself?