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A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
Liberty
Politics
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Freedom
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More quotes by Baron de Montesquieu

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The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.
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Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk.
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Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.
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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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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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A rational army would run away.
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Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
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There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.
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The state is the association of men, and not men themselves the citizen may perish, and the man remain.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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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It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
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There are countries where a man is worth nothing there are others where he is worth less than nothing.
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No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ.
Baron de Montesquieu
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An injustice to one is a threat made to all
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Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.
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Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.
Baron de Montesquieu
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The less men think, the more they talk.
Baron de Montesquieu
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I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should seem a fool, but be wise.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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There is hardly any grief that an hour's reading will not dissipate.
Baron de Montesquieu