# Quote — Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

> Under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory: it serves only to-keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich man in the position he has usurped. In fact, laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much.

- Author: [Jean Jacques Rousseau](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau.md)
- Book: [The Social Contract](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-social-contract.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-social-contract/under-bad-governments

## More from this book

> Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-social-contract/man-is-born.md)

> The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-social-contract/the-body-politic.md)

> At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-social-contract/at-genoa-the.md)