Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.

I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will.

The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.

However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.

I believe that government is for the use of the people, and not the people for the use of the government.

The modern democratic state is legitimated by the priority of the public over the private, where public goods trump private interests, and the commonweal takes precedence over individual fortunes.

Democracy, at its best, enables citizens to debate collectively how the slices of the pie should be divided and to determine which rules apply to private goods and which to public goods.

A Republic is its people.

Government of the people by the people and for the people cannot be conducted at the bidding of one man, however great he may be.

The will of the people is the best law.

If the people allow something to happen, it's the right thing.

Every man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government. They receive it with their being from the hand of nature. Individuals exercise it by their single will; collections of men by that of their majority; for the law of the majority is the natural law of every society of men.

The right to private property is inconceivable without responsibilities to the common good.

Government of the people and for the people.

The public power of all society is above every soul contained in the same society.

All government is intended for the benefit of the people.

They are to choose annually from among themselves, a certain Number of Men, according to their divisions, which constitute the General Assembly with the Governour and his Council, and have the sole power of Making Laws, and Laying Taxes for the common good when need shall require

When men unite in large societies, they cannot each take an active part in what concerns the common good. They are obliged to delegate their individual powers and rights to act, in things relating to it, to several, or to one.

When people fought for a democratic life, they were insisting that the common man had the capacity to engage in deliberation about how the community ought to run its life, not that you could let him squeak for what he wanted. And that ideal was that you could educate the common man to develop a certain amount of wisdom and that he could marshal the objectivity to deliberate and decide about what the public would require without always thinking that the political action was an opportunity to further his private interests…

'Canadian society' or the 'Canadian nation' cannot decide anything, because no one is in charge.

Men are born free, that since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior.

Supreme power rests in the will of all or of the majority.

Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves.

If we believe in a democratic system, we have to accept the will of the people.

How easy it is to govern when one follows a system of consulting the will of the people and one holds as the only norm all the actions which contribute to the well being of the people.