The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality tha… - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The end of this speech cruelly belied the brilliant hopes given to me by the beginning. "What, always a lackey?" I said to myself with a bitter disdain that confidence soon erased. I felt myself too little made for that place to fear that they would leave me there"

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.

Liberty can be obtained, it cannot be regained.