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When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

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

Democracies Government Wisdom
Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

History People Vacant
It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Adventure Empires Greatness
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
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Cutting Government Tree
When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Discover Foolishness Wit
Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Away Carried Gentle Rivers
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Fearless Philosophical Reading
The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Law Mankind Wickedness
Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Law Liberty Philosophical
Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Men People Teamwork
There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Law Passion Powerful
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Abuse Peace Tendencies
The reason the Romans built their great paved highways was because they had such inconvenient footwear.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Highway Philosophical Reason
In the matter of dress one should always keep below one’s ability.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Dresses Matter Should
I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Hate Running Thinking

When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

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When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

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