Quotes from Baron de Montesquieu

The spirit of commerce... renders every man willing to live on his own property...& prevents the growth of luxury.

The majority of men are more capable of great actions than of good ones.

Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk.

It is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.

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.

The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.

It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.

Liberty... is there only when there is no abuse of power.

There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude... we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.

When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.

Honor sets all the parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very action connects them; thus each individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own interest.

Very good laws may be ill timed.

When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.

Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.

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.

It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things.