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Solemnity is the shield of idiots

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
Stupidity
Solemnity
Shield
Shields
Idiots
Idiot

More quotes by Baron de Montesquieu

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Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.
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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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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.
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When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
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Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.
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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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Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.
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Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.
Baron de Montesquieu
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In the matter of dress one should always keep below one's ability.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Law should be like death, which spares no one.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
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Great commanders write their actions with simplicity because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
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A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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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The less luxury there is in a republic, the more it is perfect.
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There is as yet no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from legislative power and the executrix
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Republics end through luxury monarchies through poverty.
Baron de Montesquieu