Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau lands the blow where Enlightenment comfort least wants it: not on tyrants, fate, or bad institutions alone, but on the self as an engine of harm. "Our greatest evils" isn’t the everyday bruising of weather and illness; it’s the damage with moral weight - cruelty, domination, vanity, betrayal. The line works because it yanks blame inward while still leaving room for Rousseau’s larger project: showing how society manufactures the kinds of selves who commit those evils.

The subtext is a critique of the era’s favorite alibi. If you can attribute misery to "human nature" or to external conditions, no one has to change. Rousseau refuses that escape hatch. He implies that the most corrosive suffering is authored, not discovered: we produce it through choices, habits, and the stories we tell about what we deserve. The plural "ourselves" is doing quiet work too. This isn’t a private morality tale; it’s collective psychology. A people can generate its own miseries and then call them inevitable.

Context sharpens the edge. Rousseau is writing against the polished optimism of civilization-as-progress, insisting that refinement can be a mask for aggression. In the Discourse on Inequality, "amour-propre" - status-hungry self-love - turns comparison into a permanent wound, converting neighbors into rivals. In The Social Contract, the same inward impulse becomes political: citizens must remake their will, or the state becomes a machine for their worst instincts. The sentence is a warning and a dare: if evil is self-made, it is also, in principle, self-unmade.