القمع يريح ضميرنا ويجعلنا نشعر أننا دائماً على حق. يسرّنا أن نفحم أناساً لا يجرؤون على رفع صوتهم !
The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses.
My illusions about the world caused me to think that in order to benefit by my reading I ought to possess all the knowledge the book presupposed. I was very far indeed from imagining that often the au...
Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered. (Bk2:8)
Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape a fire is guilty of suicide?
I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and...
There is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is s...
If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial...
يا مكوّن الأكوان, أنا موجود لأنك موجود, إن أصررت على تأمل ذلك فلأني متعطش إلى المنبع توّاق إلى عين الحق. أعزّ ما أجني من استعمال العقل هو التفاني في جلالك. إن عقلي لينبهر, ويحلو لي القصور والعجز إذ أش...
When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself.
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance...
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.
The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that howev...
It is reason which breeds pride and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosoph...
It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see a man somehow emerging from oblivion by his own efforts, dispelling with the light of his reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, rising abov...