Patience patience quotes is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Rousseau suggests that a perfect democracy is unattainable, both in the past and future.
In this quote, Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses a profound skepticism regarding the concept of true democracy, indicating that it has never been genuinely realized and is unlikely to ever materialize. He critiques the nature of democratic systems, perhaps implying that human flaws, societal complexity, and varying interests make it impossible to achieve a perfect democratic society where every individual's voice is equally heard and valued, thus raising questions about the viability of such ideals in governance.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about political systems in a classroom setting.
More from Jean-Jacques Rousseau
All quotes βThe infant, on opening his eyes, ought to see his country, and to the hour of his death never lose sight of it.
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.
Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares.
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If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.
The whole world is not worth one soul.
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
I don't believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional, and it is all personal.
The honest man might observe... that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.
The subliminal mind receives and remembers all those touches that delight the soul. Our soul takes joy in this right touching by the Essence of all experience.