"People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society."
"Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education."
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Source: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1979). “Emile: Or, On Education”, p.38, Basic Books
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"I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery."
"There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened."
"Freedom is the power to choose our own chains"
"The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want."
"I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment."