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I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

Baron de Montesquieu

Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance… the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Religion Religious War
The less men think, the more they talk.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Men Philosophical Thinking
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Honesty Integrity War
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Body Giving Law
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Democracies Government Wisdom
Republics are brought to their ends by luxury; monarchies by poverty.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Luxury Poverty Republic
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier that other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. you are comparing your lot with an ideal which is of course better and therefore you feel worse
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Believe Gratitude People
The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Believe Miracle Vanity
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Disappointment Reading Sovereign
Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Library Men Reading
The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Powerful Sick
Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

History People Vacant
There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Country Government Reality
Power should be a check on power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Checks Evil Good
Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Given Philosophical Talent
We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Magic Two Wisdom

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

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I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

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