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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.

Baron de Montesquieu

The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Degrees Different Knowing
Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Empty Orignal Praise
To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Delight Hours Philosophical
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
If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Country Humanity Patriotism
Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Enjoy Government Liberty
The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Bad Nature Slavery States
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

God Nature Science
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
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

Religious Spirit War
There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Grief Hours Reading
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Enough Kind Moral
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 the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Law Liberty Umpires
Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Library Men Reading
Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

Earth Law Political

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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