Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group.

Citizens are not born. They are raised.

Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship... When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society.

Your ideas about right and wrong are just that-ideas. They are the thoughts which form the shape and create the substance of Who You Are. There would be only one reason to change any of these; only one purpose in making an alteration: if you are not happy with Who You Are.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

Active citizenship begins with an envisioning of the desired outcome and a conscious application of spiritual principles.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?

The question for the child is not Do I want to be good? but Whom do I want to be like?

I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Before tomorrow, make a list of your traits. Make YOUR list - who you are and why. Then ask yourself this question: where did it come from? Are you the way you are because it is what you want... or what they want? Are you a product of your imagination or someone else's? Think about it.

The aim (of education) must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who, however, see in the service to the community their highest life problem.

Honesty is most important, and it's difficult when you're young and single and sort of figuring out your own life.

Each person's task in life is to become an increasingly better person.

Our culture is at a critical cusp - a time that requires that we define what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. Within our nation we need to foster a greater sense of collective responsibility.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.

But if we believe what we profess concerning the worth of the individual, then the idea of individual development within a framework of ethical purpose must become our deepest concern, our national preoccupation, our passion, our obsession. We must think of education as relevant for everyone everywhere - at all ages and in all conditions of life.