Very good laws may be ill timed.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEUI shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.
More Baron de Montesquieu Quotes
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I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was impossible for me to execute myself.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
The spirit of commerce… renders every man willing to live on his own property…& prevents the growth of luxury.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread… and a thousand other things of the same kind.
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 -
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 -
Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Friendship is a contract in which we render small services in expectation of big ones.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.
BARON DE MONTESQUIEU -
Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.
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