There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUAs 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.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one’s wit at the expense of one’s better nature.
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Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
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There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines; they feel.
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The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.
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Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.
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Power ought to serve as a check to power.
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If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
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Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.
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They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings.
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Man is a social animal formed to please in society.
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I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.
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Law should be like death, which spares no one.
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Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!
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What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.
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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.
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There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude… we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.
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Virtue in a republic is the love of one’s country, that is the love of equality.
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Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.
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Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.
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Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.
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…when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can only come from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.
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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.
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Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
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It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
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The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.
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Liberty… is there only when there is no abuse of power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU