2. …speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society. They spoke about savage man, and it was civil man they depicted.

3. …command us to believe that since God himself drew men out of the state of nature, they are unequal because he wanted them to be so.

4. …a hymn in praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who have the unhappiness of living after you.

5. The great inequality in manner of living,… the unwholesome food of the poor,… together with …excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental exhaustion, the innumerable pains and anxieties inseparable from every condition of life…these are too fatal proofs that the greater part of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed.

6. …in following the history of civil society, we shall be telling also that of human sickness

7. …sociable and a slave, he grows weak, timid and servile; his effeminate way of life totally enervates his strength and courage.

8. …the mechanism of the senses and… ideas; but in the power of willing… nothing is to be found but acts which are purely spiritual and wholly inexplicable by the laws of mechanism.

9. It would be melancholy, were we forced to admit that [perfectibility] …is the source of all human misfortunes…

10. …a tyrant both over himself and over nature.

11. …hunger at the first oak, …slaking his thirst at the first brook; finding his bed at the foot of the tree …with that, all his wants supplied.

12. …let us not conclude, with Hobbes, that because man has no idea of goodness, he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue.

13. “…perish if you will, I am secure.”

14. THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground … saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society

15. …the first yoke he inadvertently imposed on himself, and the first source of the evils he prepared for his descendants.

16. It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not
It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things.

17. Insatiable ambition,.. the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence.

18. …the first effect of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality. The wealthy, … using their old slaves to acquire new, thought of nothing but subduing and enslaving their neighbors; like ravenous wolves, which, having once tasted human flesh, despise every other food and thenceforth seek only men to devour.

19. All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty… which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich;… eternally fixed the law of property and inequality … [and] subjected all mankind to perpetual labor, slavery and wretchedness.

20. …we are enabled to judge pretty exactly how far a people has departed from its primitive constitution, and of its progress towards the extreme term of corruption….

21. …universal desire for reputation, honors and advancement…inflames …excites and multiplies our passions…by creating universal competition and rivalry…among men,… numberless failures, successes and disturbances of all kinds by making so many aspirants run the same course.

22. The sciences, letters and arts… spread… flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of original liberty…. make them love their slavery…into what is called civilized peoples.