Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes on Freedom
Rousseau's Social Contract opens with the line that man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains — and then attempts to specify the form of political association in which civic freedom can be reconciled with the legitimate constraints of communal life. The general will is not the aggregate of private interests but the citizens' common interest in the conditions of their shared autonomy; obedience to a law one prescribes oneself counts as freedom rather than constraint. Rousseau's reframing of liberty as collective self-rule shaped the French revolutionary tradition and the subsequent dispute, framed by Constant and Berlin, between ancient and modern conceptions of liberty.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
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Attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.”
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Attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”
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Attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.”
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“A country cannot subsist well without liberty , nor liberty without virtue .”
As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards , p. 301.