Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUVanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
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 -
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 -
Friendship is a contract in which we render small services in expectation of big ones.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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 -
When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
To lend money without interest, is certainly an action laudable and extremely good; but it is obvious, that it is only a counsel of religion, and not a civil law.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU