Law should be like death, which spares no one.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUExperience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
You have to study a great deal to know a little.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The less luxury there is in a republic, the more it is perfect.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window.
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 -
Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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 -
This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU