When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
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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A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Slowness is frequently the cause of much greater slowness.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Injustice towards others is a threat to everybody
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The alms given to a naked man in the street do not fulfil the obligations of the state, which owes to every citizen a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
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.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Peace is a natural effect of trade.
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Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Coffee renders many foolish people temporarily capable of wise actions
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU