Quotes from Montesquieu

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

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.

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.

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.

The reason the Romans built their great paved highways was because they had such inconvenient footwear.

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should seem a fool, but be wise.

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.

We must have constantly present in our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would no longer be possessed of liberty.

Peace is a natural effect of trade.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come.

Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans.

To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.

No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ.

The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.

What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.

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?

In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.

The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.