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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.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
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The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.
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Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
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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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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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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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Vanity and pride of nations vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
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Power ought to serve as a check to power.
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...when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can only come from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.
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Solemnity is the shield of idiots
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To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.
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With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing: one must also make them felt. Of such kind are moral truths.
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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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If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
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I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
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Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
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Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
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What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.
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I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.
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I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.
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Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.
Baron de Montesquieu