Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

... a moral skunk .... [who has] debauched America ...

Ambition is the mother of hypocrisy and prefers to skulk in corners and dark places. It cannot endure the light of day. It is an unclean vice wallowing in the depths, always hidden, but with ever an eye to advancement.

Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love.

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

Vice knows [its] ugly, so [it] puts on [a] mask.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

Everyone is born sincere and die deceivers.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

If the best man's faults were written on his forehead, he would draw his hat over his eyes.

When a man gets his money in bad ways, when he sees the better course and takes the worse, then the devil's in his heart, and that fixes him.

He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, both of them are abomination …

There are various ways of keeping truth out of sight.

Tell them I lied.

An oath is the liar's retreat. Behind it falsehood puts on the robes of truth. The perjurer delights in swearing, for the act invests him with the appearance of honesty. An oath makes the tongue of vice as pure as the lips of virtue. It gives a rogue the weapon of the gentleman. It permits guilt to wear the dress of innocence. The man who is willing to tell the truth feels that his honesty is impeached when asked to take an oath

Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.

In my experience in Washington, when people refuse to come clean, it is usually because they are hiding dirty laundry.

He that's ungrateful has no guilt but one; All other crimes may pass for virtues in him.

When we do something we're not proud of, a lot of people don't want to look at that, people may say "what people don't know won't hurt them."

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.

As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone, And hides the ruin that it feeds upon, So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Sin is in, and so we begin.