When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUUseless laws weaken the necessary laws.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!
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Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.
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Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.
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But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
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The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.
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It is unreasonable … to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.
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Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.
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Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
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Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.
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The English are busy; they don’t have time to be polite.
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Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.
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Man is a social animal formed to please in society.
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I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
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Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
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Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.
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The incomparable stupidity of life teaches us to love our parents; divine philosophy teaches us to forgive them.
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In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
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One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.
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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.
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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.
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I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.
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Coffee renders many foolish people temporarily capable of wise actions
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When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
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A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
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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.
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I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced these wars; it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.
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