Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUThe state of slavery is in its own nature bad.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
-
-
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Law should be like death, which spares no one.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Republics come to an end by luxurious habits; monarchies by poverty.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Wherever I find envy I take a pleasure in provoking it: I always praise before an envious man those who make him grow pale.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
If you run after wit, you will succeed in catching folly.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Europe is a state with several provinces
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance… the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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 -
Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should seem a fool, but be wise.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU