Solemnity is the shield of idiots
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUAn empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.
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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.
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Power ought to serve as a check to power.
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Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.
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The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.
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Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
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When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government.
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There should be weeping at a man’s birth, not at his death.
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Virtue is necessary to a republic.
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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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Mediocrity is a hand-rail.
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Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.
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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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The coffee is prepared in such a way that it makes those who drink it witty: at least there is not a single soul who, on quitting the house, does not believe himself four times wittier that when he entered it.
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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






