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Linked from Essay I, Section 13: "When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: 'let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leave revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just'" |
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From Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on Inequality, p. 99 Readers' Questions
RETURN TO ESSAY ONE |
...savages are not wicked
precisely because they do not know what it is to be good; for
it is neither the development of intelligence nor the restraint
of the laws, but the calm of the passions and the ignorance of
vice which prevents them from doing evil."