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Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
Ought
Law
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Giving
Precepts
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There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines they feel.
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The less men think, the more they talk.
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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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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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Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?
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Honor is unknown in despotic states.
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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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When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.
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I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
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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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Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.
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Law should be like death, which spares no one.
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The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.
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Mediocrity is a hand-rail.
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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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Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.
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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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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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It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things.
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When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy.
Baron de Montesquieu