It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUSolemnity is the shield of idiots
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
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When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.
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There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.
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Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.
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In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
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Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.
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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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At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.
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If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.
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Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!
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The state is the association of men, and not men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.
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Each particular society begins to feel its strength, whence arises a state of war between different nations.
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With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing: one must also make them felt. Of such kind are moral truths.
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We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school-masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.
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The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU