Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.

Konunun içyüzünü, bildiklerimi yalnızca adalet kurallarına göre kullancak denli biliyor muyum? Dahası var; başkalarına borçlu bulunduklarımızı, yalnızca gerçeğe borçlu bulunduklarımızı gereğince düşündüm mü? Birini aldatırken zarara düşürmezsem, bu, kendime zarar vermiyorum demek midir? Kusursuz olmak için haksızlık etmemek yeter mi?

O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may be, attend to my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I have read it, not in books composed by those like you, for they are liars, but in the book of nature which never lies. All that I shall repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood, but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own conceits. The times I am going to speak of are very remote. How much you are changed from what you once were! 'Tis in a manner the life of your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which you have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave, but could not destroy. There is, I am sensible, an age at which every individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Uneasy at your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered, as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of your contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those who may have the misfortune of succeeding you.