Rousseau

I am currently reading Rousseau’s Social Contract online in an attempt to stay awake after lunch, having expediently completed all work and been abandoned by everyone in my office. As I normally mark up my nonfiction books with all sorts of comments and underlines, and as I can not exactly do this to an online book, I thought I’d share some quotes that stood out for me.

(Book-Chapter.)

1-1. Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.

(How ironic that I was just sent an email with this picture.)

1-4. To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity, and even its duties.

1-4. These principals…are not based on the authority of poets, but derived from the nature of reality and based on reality.

2-2. Truth is no road to fortune.

2-7. We should not…conclude from this that politics and religion have among us a common object, but that, in the first periods of nations, the one is used as an instrument for the other.

I'm only about 3/4 through the book from today's reading... I'll see if I remember to post quotes as I continue reading.