“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau
Rousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.
Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.
Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love. He said of his long-time mistress, a lowly laundress that he,
Never felt the lease glimmering of love for her . . . the sensual needs I satisfied with her were purely sexual.
When those sensual needs resulted in five children, he put them into orphanages, which, given the state of orphanages in the 18thcentury, was practically a sentence of torture and early death: only five percent of orphan children survived to adulthood, and most of the adult survivors became beggars and vagabonds.