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When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
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Customs
Manners
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Laws
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Law

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Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.
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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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Vanity and pride of nations vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
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When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
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Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
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Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.
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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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I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.
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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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There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
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There is hardly any grief that an hour's reading will not dissipate.
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The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.
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An injustice to one is a threat made to all
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There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window.
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A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
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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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When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
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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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I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.
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The less men think, the more they talk.
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