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 MONTESQUIEUThe 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.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Wonderful maxim: not to talk of things any more after they are done.
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[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.
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Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.
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Slowness is frequently the cause of much greater slowness.
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We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school-masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.
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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.
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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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At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.
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Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
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The less men think, the more they talk.
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The less luxury there is in a republic, the more it is perfect.
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When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.
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It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things.
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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.
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Honor is unknown in despotic states.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU