Baron de Montesquieu
It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.Collection: Checks
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Education
In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.Collection: Equality
Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.Collection: Men
An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.Collection: Justice
Law should be like death, which spares no one.Collection: Law
To succeed in the world we must look foolish but be wise.Collection: Success
That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth. They tend to go as far as the barriers will allow.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Wisdom
The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.Collection: Men
Solemnity is the shield of idiotsCollection: Stupidity
Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.Collection: Courage
There are countries where a man is worth nothing; there are others where he is worth less than nothing.Collection: Country
I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Men
Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour's reading would not dissipate.Collection: Disappointment
No tyranny is more cruel than the one practised in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves. And since a tyrant never lacks instruments for his tyranny, Tiberius always found judges ready to condemn as many people as he might suspect.Collection: Tyrants
I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced these wars; it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.Collection: Religious
Virtue is necessary to a republic.Collection: Republic
Christians are beginning to lose the spirit of intolerance which animated them: experience has shown the error of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and of the persecution of those Christians in France whose belief differed a little from that of the king. They have realized that zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfil its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it.Collection: Christian
The history of commerce is that of the communication of the people.Collection: Communication
There is as yet no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from legislative power and the executrixCollection: Judging
Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Passion
Experience 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.Collection: Power
In vain do we seek tranquility in the desert; temptations are always with us; our passions, represented by the demons, never let us alone: those monsters created by the heart, those illusions produced by the mind, those vain specters that are our errors and our lies always appear before us to seduce us; they attack us even in our fasting or our mortifications, in other words, in our very strength.Collection: Lying
They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings.Collection: Intelligent
Man is a social animal formed to please in society.Collection: Animal
Virtue has needs of limits.Collection: Needs
It is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.Collection: Men
Mediocrity is a hand-rail.Collection: Confidence
A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.Collection: Writing
Love of the republic in a democracy, is a love of the democracy; love of the democracy is that of equality. Love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality.Collection: Equality
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.Collection: Law
When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.Collection: Wit
At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.Collection: Country
I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.Collection: Running
The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.Collection: Country
Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.Collection: Nature
As virtue is necessary in a republic, and honor in a monarchy, fear is what is required in a despotism. As for virtue, it is not at all necessary, and honor would be dangerous there.Collection: Political
Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.Collection: God
Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.Collection: Men
When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.Collection: Brain
We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.Collection: Wisdom
The English are busy folk; they have no time in which to be polite.Collection: Time
The state is the association of men, and not men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.Collection: Men
Vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous. To be convinced of this we need only represent, on the one hand,the numberless benefits which result from vanity, as industry, the arts, fashions, politeness, and taste; and on the other, the infinite evils which spring from the pride of certain nations, a laziness, poverty, a total neglect of everything.Collection: Fashion
The crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom.Collection: People
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.Collection: Divorce