A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUWe 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.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
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 -
Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
A really intelligent man feels what other men only know.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should seem a fool, but be wise.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
You have to study a great deal to know a little.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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 -
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