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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

The English are busy folk; they have no time in which to be polite.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Busy Polite Time
Virtue has needs of limits.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Limits Needs Virtue
Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

God Religion Thinking
An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Human Justice Rights Threat
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Fearless Philosophical Reading
To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Delight Hours Philosophical
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

Character Giving Leadership
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Corruption Degrees Government
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

Blind Intelligent World
The prejudices of superstition are superior to all others, and have the strongest influence on the human mind.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Mind Prejudice Superstitions
Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Giving Law Made
There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Grief Hours Reading
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
When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Government Long Luxury
The majority of men are more capable of great actions than of good ones.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Deed Majority Men
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Country Freedom Wells

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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