Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

The people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

We corrupt the word of truth, and mix ... our doctrine with what is common and cheap... in order to turn the adulteration to our profit, and accommodate ourselves to those who meet us, and curry favor with everyone, becoming ventriloquists and chatterers, who serve their own pleasures by words uttered from the earth, and sinking into the earth, and, to gain the special good will of the multitude

If you hang around politics long enough, you tend to get disappointed by people.

They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying.

They kept the lie going, and the people loved it.

But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

When [Satan] undertook to draw Eve away from God, he did not hit her with a stick, but with an idea. It was with an idea that God could not be trusted and that she must act on her own to secure her own well-being.

Ambition is exhausting. It makes you friends with people for the wrong reasons, just like drugs.

The American people have a right to know that, when Donald Trump's making decisions, they are being made in their best interests without him lining his pockets.

Loyalty is in most people only a ruse used by self-interest to attract confidence.

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, which is just long enough to be president of the United States.

At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day - indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue - the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.

The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests. This bothers some people because they're more concerned with motives than with results.

Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

Nature doesn't cheat - people do.

Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.

Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.

For when success a lover's toil attends,Few ask, if fraud or force attain'd his ends

I would say that today, dishonesty is the rule, and honesty the exception. It could be, statistically, that more people are honest than dishonest, but the few that really control things are not honest, and that tips the balance.

People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.

That's why they (the Bush administration) had to make up that story about weapons of mass destruction. Because that was the only thing that would sell to the American people, and that wasn't true.