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 MONTESQUIEUVirtue is necessary to a republic.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Power ought to serve as a check to power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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 -
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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When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.
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Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.
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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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Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
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You have to study a great deal to know a little.
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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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There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
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We must have constantly present in our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would no longer be possessed of liberty.
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Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.
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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.
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Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
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To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU