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When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
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It is not the young people that degenerate they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.
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When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
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When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.
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The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.
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I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
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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.
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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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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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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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An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
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[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.
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In the matter of dress one should always keep below one's ability.
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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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Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.
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Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
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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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A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
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Love of the republic in a democracy, is a love of the democracy love of the democracy is that of equality. Love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality.
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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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