Man (n.) is a being which, much like the statue of glaucus (which time, sea and storms had so disfigured that it looked less like a God than a wild beast) has changed enormously over the ages, altered in the bosom of society to something nearly unrecognizable.
Man (n.) is born free and everywhere he is in chains.
Man (n.) is the meddler in a world God made good: he grafts, mutilates, deforms, and will have nothing as nature made it — not even himself, whom he trains like a saddle-horse.
Man (n.) and citizen cannot both be trained: forced to fight either nature or society, you must choose which one to make.
Man (n.) has no known limit: no philosopher has dared say "thus far and no further" — none of us has measured the possible difference between man and man.
Man (n.) is a rank that cannot be lost, and he will have fewer equals in it than in yours, madam — "A trade for my son!"
Man (n.) by nature is no king, noble, courtier or millionaire: all are born poor and naked, liable to every sorrow, and condemned at length to die, and this is what it really means to be a man.
Man (n.) is by nature good; society depraves him — respect the individual, despise the multitude; all men wear nearly the same mask, but some faces are fairer than the mask that hides them.
Man (n.) is the cheapest commodity on the market; among all our rights of property, the rights of the individual are always considered last.
Man (n.) is a fragment of some vast whole, abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, yet vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole.
Man (n.) is lord of the earth because he alone can relate all things to himself: by contemplation he takes possession of the stars he cannot approach — what other creature makes fire and admires the sun?
Man (n.) is the one disorder in a harmonious creation: the elements agree, men are in chaos; the beasts are happy, their king alone is wretched.
Man (n.) in his primitive state is the gentlest thing there is, placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal ingenuity of civilised man.
Man (n.) is naturally good; experience proves men wicked — what has depraved him, if not his advances and his knowledge?
Man (n.) must be studied from afar: to study men you look close at hand, but to study man you must first observe differences in order to discover what all share.