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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
Baron de Montesquieu
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Baron de Montesquieu
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More quotes by Baron de Montesquieu
A fondness for reading changes the inevitable dull hours of our life into exquisite hours of delight.
Baron de Montesquieu
Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits.
Baron de Montesquieu
Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.
Baron de Montesquieu
When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
Baron de Montesquieu
Honor is unknown in despotic states.
Baron de Montesquieu
Law should be like death, which spares no one.
Baron de Montesquieu
An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
Baron de Montesquieu
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.
Baron de Montesquieu
The state is the association of men, and not men themselves the citizen may perish, and the man remain.
Baron de Montesquieu
[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind.
Baron de Montesquieu
Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?
Baron de Montesquieu
There should be weeping at a man's birth, not at his death.
Baron de Montesquieu
I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
Baron de Montesquieu
When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
Baron de Montesquieu
To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.
Baron de Montesquieu
Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
Baron de Montesquieu
It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things.
Baron de Montesquieu
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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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.
Baron de Montesquieu
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.
Baron de Montesquieu
