Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUThere is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
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In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
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Power ought to serve as a check to power.
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The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.
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The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.
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Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.
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In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
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The pagan religion, which prohibited only some of the grosser crimes, and which stopped the hand but meddled not with the heart, might have crimes that were inexplicable.
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Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
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The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.
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There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude… we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.
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There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.
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Liberty… is there only when there is no abuse of power.
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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.
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One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU