I am certain that the writings of Rousseau lead directly to this kind of shameful evil.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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When the fence from the gallantry of preceptors is broken down, and your families are no longer protected by decent pride and salutary domestic prejudice, there is but one step to a frightful corruption.
Instead of this passion, naturally allied to grace and manners, they infuse into their youth an unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness,--of metaphysical speculations blended with the coarsest…
Through him they teach men to love after the fashion of philosophers: that is, they teach to men, to Frenchmen, a love without gallantry,--a love without anything of that fine flower of youthfulness and gentility which places it, if not…
A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.
Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulation of life.
They call on the rising generation in France to take a sympathy in the adventures and fortunes, and they endeavor to engage their sensibility on the side, of pedagogues who betray the most awful family trusts and vitiate their female…
To understand either, we must connect the morals with the politics of the legislators.
If the system of institution recommended by the Assembly is false and theatric, it is because their system of government is of the same character.
But it is plain that the present rebellion was its legitimate offspring, and it is piously fed by that rebellion with a daily dole.
Thousands admire the sentimental-writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish.
Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural feelings.
He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of…
Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labor, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver; and then he pleads…
Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy.
It is that new-invented virtue which your masters canonize that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence, whilst his heart was incapable of harboring one…
It is such a life that, with a wild defiance, he flings in the face of his Creator, whom he acknowledges only to brave.
It was this abuse and perversion, which vanity makes even of hypocrisy, which has driven Rousseau to record a life not so much as checkered or spotted here and there with virtues, or even distinguished by a single good action.
He has not observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is omnivorous,--that it has no choice in its food,--that it is fond to talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and what …
It is from the same deranged, eccentric vanity, that this, the insane Socrates of the National Assembly, was impelled to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory from bringing hardily to light the…
As I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day, he left no doubt on my mind that he entertained no principle, either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding, but vanity.
His best qualities are poisoned and perverted by it, and operate exactly as the worst.
It leaves nothing sincere or trustworthy about him.
When full-grown, it is the worst of vices, and the occasional mimic of them all.
Their object is to merge all natural and all social sentiment in inordinate vanity.
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