Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUThey 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.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Virtue is necessary to a republic.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.
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 -
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 -
In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Power ought to serve as a check to power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Liberty… is there only when there is no abuse of power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Although born in a prosperous realm, we did not believe that its boundaries should limit our knowledge, and that the lore of the East should alone enlighten us.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Friendship is a contract in which we render small services in expectation of big ones.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
We 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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU