Top 100 Quotes About Baron De Montesquieu
#1. I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.
Baron De Montesquieu
#3. It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour.
Baron De Montesquieu
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Christianity stamped its character on jurisprudence; for empire has ever a connection with the priesthood.
Baron De Montesquieu
#8. The spirit of commerce ... renders every man willing to live on his own property ... & prevents the growth of luxury.
Baron De Montesquieu
#9. When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
Baron De Montesquieu
#10. 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
#11. Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
Baron De Montesquieu
#12. 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
#14. It is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.
Baron De Montesquieu
#15. Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.
Baron De Montesquieu
#16. [The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread ... and a thousand other things of the same kind.
Baron De Montesquieu
#17. Virtue in a republic is the love of one's country, that is the love of equality.
Baron De Montesquieu
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#25. The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice.
Baron De Montesquieu
#27. Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.
Baron De Montesquieu
#28. A fondness for reading changes the inevitable dull hours of our life into exquisite hours of delight.
Baron De Montesquieu
#30. 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
#33. The incomparable stupidity of life teaches us to love our parents; divine philosophy teaches us to forgive them.
Baron De Montesquieu
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Wherever I find envy I take a pleasure in provoking it: I always praise before an envious man those who make him grow pale.
Baron De Montesquieu
#39. Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.
Baron De Montesquieu
#40. The alms given to a naked man in the street do not fulfil the obligations of the state, which owes to every citizen a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health.
Baron De Montesquieu
#42. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.
Baron De Montesquieu
#54. Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
Baron De Montesquieu
#55. Friendship is a contract in which we render small services in expectation of big ones.
Baron De Montesquieu
#56. Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.
Baron De Montesquieu
#58. At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.
Baron De Montesquieu
#60. Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
Baron De Montesquieu
#61. Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.
Baron De Montesquieu
#63. Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
Baron De Montesquieu
#65. Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.
Baron De Montesquieu
#67. When the [law making] and [law enforcement] powers are united in the same person ... there can be no liberty.
Baron De Montesquieu
#69. I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
Baron De Montesquieu
#70. 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
#71. Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits.
Baron De Montesquieu
#72. 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
#73. The state is the association of men, and not men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.
Baron De Montesquieu
#74. 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
#76. I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.
Baron De Montesquieu
#78. 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
#81. The power of divorce can be given only to those who feel the inconveniences of marriage, and who are sensible of the moment when it is for their interest to make them cease.
Baron De Montesquieu
#82. It is difficult for the united states to be all of equal power and extent.
Baron De Montesquieu
#83. Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.
Baron De Montesquieu
#84. 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
#86. There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
Baron De Montesquieu
#87. The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.
Baron De Montesquieu
#91. In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.
Baron De Montesquieu
#92. The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.
Baron De Montesquieu
#94. 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
#97. There is as yet no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from legislative power and the executrix
Baron De Montesquieu
#98. For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.
Baron De Montesquieu
#99. It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
Baron De Montesquieu
#100. The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.
Baron De Montesquieu
