The power of divorce can be given only to those who feel the inconveniences of marriage, and who are sensible of the moment when it is for their interest to make them cease.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUExperience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
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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.
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Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.
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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 should be weeping at a man’s birth, not at his death.
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I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.
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In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of states who give it its special character; and afterward it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state.
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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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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.
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Democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is corrupted, but likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality.
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Honor is unknown in despotic states.
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Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.
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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.
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This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.
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Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU