“It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.”

“One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.”

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”

“It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.”

“A State can be no better than the citizens of which it is composed. Our labour now is not to mould States but make citizens.”

“But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.''You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.”

“I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. [in response to Rousseau's "The Social Contract"]”