It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUThe Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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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 -
Wonderful maxim: not to talk of things any more after they are done.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.
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 -
The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
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 -
What cowardice it is to be dismayed by the happiness of others and devastated by there good fortune.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU