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

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
Knowing
Exerted
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Consists
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Administration
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An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
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I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.
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Europe is a state with several provinces
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Honor is unknown in despotic states.
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...when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can only come from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.
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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.
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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.
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The state is the association of men, and not men themselves the citizen may perish, and the man remain.
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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.
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Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.
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The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.
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At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.
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Luxury ruins republics poverty, monarchies.
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If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident
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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.
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There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
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There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window.
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You have to study a great deal to know a little.
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Republics come to an end by luxurious habits monarchies by poverty.
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I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
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