Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

All men are by nature born equally free and independent.

Here everyone is his own master. Civil liberty places all inhabitants on an equal footing. The humble cannot be oppressed by the mighty, nor the poor by the rich.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.

Democracy rests upon two pillars: one, the principle that all men are equally entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and the other, the conviction that such equal opportunity will most advance civilization.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Government itself is founded upon the great doctrine of the consent of the governed, and has its cornerstone in the memorable principle that men are endowed with inalienable rights.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal - that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.

Argentina wouldn't exist if not for self-determination, and this can't be valid for some but not for others.

But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other.

Russia is the only place where men and women can be free.

The nation is formed through the law of nature alone. Government stems from the will of nation. The nation stands before all things and is the source of all things. Its will is always law. Above it and before it is but the law of nature alone. By virtue of its very existence, the nation is all things that it may be. The nation cannot surrender its right to a tyrant.

All men are born free.

America’s ancestors give them the love of equality and of freedom, but God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.

The only natural society is a society of liberty and equality.

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

First there is the democratic idea: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights; that these rights are alienable only by the possessor thereof; that they are equal in men; that government is to organize these natural, unalienable and equal rights into institutions designed for the good of the governed, and therefore government is to be of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. Here government is development, not exploitation.

It's liberty or it's death. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.

The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual.

It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.