Power ought to serve as a check to power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUThere are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
I like peasants-they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The majority of men are more capable of great actions than of good ones.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
There should be weeping at a man’s birth, not at his death.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
A fondness for reading changes the inevitable dull hours of our life into exquisite hours of delight.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Very good laws may be ill timed.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.
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 -
Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
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 -
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 -
To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU