Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in a letter to James Boswell:
“Sir, I have no liking for the world. I live here in a world of fantasies and I cannot tolerate the world as it is. … Mankind disgusts me.”
On why Rousseau is now more important than Marx in explaining the substantial pathological elements in our intellectual culture – check out my conversation with James Lindsay and Michael O’Fallon.
And for fuller details on Rousseau, including his influence on Kant and Hegel and the Counter-Enlightenment turn, see Chapter 4 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.