[slickpoppa]

Well, you posted a quote without commenting on it so I don't know what your intentions are. So do you want to know what I think about this quote? Okay, I will tell you.

I really don't see anything profound in this quote by itself, and I'm not a really big fan of short quotations in general. Usually when someone references a quote such as this they are attemtping to prove a point with minimal effort, sophistication, or evidence. People think that when quoting something such as, "Ignorance is bliss," the quote speaks for itself and they have proven that ignorance is indeed bliss. I'm not saying that the original poster was actually trying to do the same thing with the Rousseau quote, but that is a common problem I have with the usage of such quotes in arguements. The aforementioned quotation is really no more profound than the statement that ignorance is bliss. All the quote does is assert without any justification that humans are naturally good. Of course, I don't think that it is possible to prove in one or two sentences that man is naturally good. So I don't really see the value in this quote. As far as I can tell, all the quote does is make the assertion that man is naturally good with a lot of unnecessary language added that does not really strenghten the validity of the assertion.