A really intelligent man feels what other men only know.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUDemocracy 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.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
-
-
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The less men think, the more they talk.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Power ought to serve as a check to power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Wonderful maxim: not to talk of things any more after they are done.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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 -
There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced these wars; it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU