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 MONTESQUIEUWith 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.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Love of the republic in a democracy, is a love of the democracy; love of the democracy is that of equality. Love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality.
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It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
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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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If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman… because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.
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When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.
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Law should be like death, which spares no one.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.
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.
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Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.
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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 -
Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.
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The English are busy folk; they have no time in which to be polite.
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The laws do not take upon them to punish any other than overt acts.
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There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window.
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There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU