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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
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Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
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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.
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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.
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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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Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
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Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?
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When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
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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.
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If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Law should be like death, which spares no one.
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A rational army would run away.
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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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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.
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Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
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An injustice to one is a threat made to all
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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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