Top 100 Baron De Montesquieu Quotes
#3. Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour's reading would not dissipate.
Baron De Montesquieu
#4. The state is the association of men, and not men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.
Baron De Montesquieu
#5. We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.
Baron De Montesquieu
#6. The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.
Baron De Montesquieu
#7. I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
Baron De Montesquieu
#9. When the [law making] and [law enforcement] powers are united in the same person ... there can be no liberty.
Baron De Montesquieu
#10. Honor sets all the parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very action connects them; thus each individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own interest.
Baron De Montesquieu
#11. Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
Baron De Montesquieu
#13. Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.
Baron De Montesquieu
#14. Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
Baron De Montesquieu
#15. At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.
Baron De Montesquieu
#17. Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.
Baron De Montesquieu
#18. Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
Baron De Montesquieu
#20. When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.
Baron De Montesquieu
#22. The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.
Baron De Montesquieu
#23. For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.
Baron De Montesquieu
#24. There is as yet no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from legislative power and the executrix
Baron De Montesquieu
#27. The crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom.
Baron De Montesquieu
#30. I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.
Baron De Montesquieu
#32. There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
Baron De Montesquieu
#34. As virtue is necessary in a republic, and honor in a monarchy, fear is what is required in a despotism. As for virtue, it is not at all necessary, and honor would be dangerous there.
Baron De Montesquieu
#37. The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.
Baron De Montesquieu
#39. Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.
Baron De Montesquieu
#40. The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice.
Baron De Montesquieu
#41. I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.
Baron De Montesquieu
#43. The pagan religion, which prohibited only some of the grosser crimes, and which stopped the hand but meddled not with the heart, might have crimes that were inexplicable.
Baron De Montesquieu
#44. That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth. They tend to go as far as the barriers will allow.
Baron De Montesquieu
#45. In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
Baron De Montesquieu
#46. Virtue in a republic is the love of one's country, that is the love of equality.
Baron De Montesquieu
#47. I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.
Baron De Montesquieu
#49. As men are affected in all ages by the same passions, the occasions which bring about great changes are different, but the causes are always the same.
Baron De Montesquieu
#50. Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
Baron De Montesquieu
#51. Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.
Baron De Montesquieu
#52. The spirit of commerce ... renders every man willing to live on his own property ... & prevents the growth of luxury.
Baron De Montesquieu
#53. Christianity stamped its character on jurisprudence; for empire has ever a connection with the priesthood.
Baron De Montesquieu
#54. If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident
Baron De Montesquieu
#55. Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.
Baron De Montesquieu
#56. When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.
Baron De Montesquieu
#58. In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.
Baron De Montesquieu
#59. Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.
Baron De Montesquieu
#60. The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.
Baron De Montesquieu
#61. Better it is to say that the government most comfortable to nature is that which best agrees with the humor and disposition of the people in whose favor it is established.
Baron De Montesquieu
#62. In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of states who give it its special character; and afterward it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state.
Baron De Montesquieu
#64. Each citizen contributes to the revenues of the State a portion of his property in order that his tenure of the rest may be secure.
Baron De Montesquieu
#68. There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.
Baron De Montesquieu
#69. I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was impossible for me to execute myself
Baron De Montesquieu
#71. The incomparable stupidity of life teaches us to love our parents; divine philosophy teaches us to forgive them.
Baron De Montesquieu
#73. There are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law.
Baron De Montesquieu
#74. Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.
Baron De Montesquieu
#75. The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf.
Baron De Montesquieu
#77. The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
Baron De Montesquieu
#79. Democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is corrupted, but likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality.
Baron De Montesquieu
#80. Ever since the invention of gunpowder.. I continually tremble lest men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abolishing mankind, of annihilating peoples and nations in their entirety.
Baron De Montesquieu
#81. It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.
Baron De Montesquieu
#82. The prejudices of superstition are superior to all others, and have the strongest influence on the human mind.
Baron De Montesquieu
#83. When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government.
Baron De Montesquieu
#85. If you would be holy, instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed to you.
Baron De Montesquieu
#89. What cowardice it is to be dismayed by the happiness of others and devastated by there good fortune.
Baron De Montesquieu
#90. I shall ever repeat it, that mankind are governed not by extremes, but by principals of moderation.
Baron De Montesquieu
#91. There are countries where a man is worth nothing; there are others where he is worth less than nothing.
Baron De Montesquieu
#92. To lend money without interest, is certainly an action laudable and extremely good; but it is obvious, that it is only a counsel of religion, and not a civil law.
Baron De Montesquieu
#93. When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.
Baron De Montesquieu
#94. A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.
Baron De Montesquieu
#96. Political liberty in a citizen is that tranquillity of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security, and in order for him to have this liberty the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another citizen.
Baron De Montesquieu
#97. The coffee is prepared in such a way that it makes those who drink it witty: at least there is not a single soul who, on quitting the house, does not believe himself four times wittier that when he entered it.
Baron De Montesquieu
#98. There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines; they feel.
Baron De Montesquieu
#99. In the state of nature ... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.
Baron De Montesquieu
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