Monica

“Virtue is the product of good government. ‘Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.’ The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“Partly by accident, partly by instinct, partly by deliberate contrivance, he was the first intellectual systematically to exploit the guilt of the privileged. And he did it, moreover, in an entirely new way, by the systematic cult of rudeness. He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

“People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“The inquiry begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who was the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all.”
― Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky