We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Our gardens are decorated with statues and our galleries with paintings. What do you think these artistic masterpieces on show for public admiration represent? The defenders of our country? Or those even greater men who have enriched it with their virtues? No. They are images of all the errors of the heart and mind, carefully derived from ancient mythology, and presented to our children's curiosity at a young age, no doubt so that they may have right before their eyes models of bad actions even before they know how to read.

When a man is set in authority over others, everything conspires to rob him of his sense of justice and reason.

First, because, in the first case, the right of conquest being in fact no right at all, it could not serve as a foundation for any other right, the conqueror and the conquered ever remaining with respect to each other in a state of war, unless the conquered, restored to the full possession of their liberty, should freely choose their conqueror for their chief. Till then, whatever capitulations might have been made between them, as these capitulations were founded upon violence, and of course de facto null and void, there could not have existed in this hypothesis either a true society, or a political body, or any other law but that of the strongest. Second, because these words strong and weak, are ambiguous in the second case; for during the interval between the establishment of the right of property or prior occupation and that of political government, the meaning of these terms is better expressed by the words poor and rich, as before the establishment of laws men in reality had no other means of reducing their equals, but by invading the property of these equals, or by parting with some of their own property to them. Third, because the poor having nothing but their liberty to lose, it would have been the height of madness in them to give up willingly the only blessing they had left without obtaining some consideration for it: whereas the rich being sensible, if I may say so, in every part of their possessions, it was much easier to do them mischief, and therefore more incumbent upon them to guard against it; and because, in fine, it is but reasonable to suppose, that a thing has been invented by him to whom it could be of service rather than by him to whom it must prove detrimental.