When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Pero ¿con qué objeto un pueblo se vendería a un rey? Lejos de procurar la subsistencia a sus súbditos, el rey saca la suya de ellos, y según Rabelais no es poco lo que un rey necesita para vivir. ¿Será que los súbditos ceden su persona a condición de que se les quiten también sus bienes? ¿Que les quedará después para conservar?

"I have somewhere read of a wise bishop who in a visit to his diocese found an old woman whose only prayer consisted in the single interjection "Oh!-

"Good mother" said he to her, "continue to pray in this manner; your prayer is better than ours." This better prayer is mine also.

The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us.