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Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
Men
Formed
Please
Animal
Society
Social

More quotes by Baron de Montesquieu

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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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I should like to abolish funerals the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
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Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.
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I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.
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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When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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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A rational army would run away.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Great commanders write their actions with simplicity because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
Baron de Montesquieu
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The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.
Baron de Montesquieu
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It is clear that in a monarchy, where he who commands the exceution of the laws generally thinks himself above them, there is lessneed of virtue than in a popular government, where the person entrusted with the execution of the laws is sensible of his being subject to their direction.
Baron de Montesquieu
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If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
Baron de Montesquieu
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We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.
Baron de Montesquieu
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It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.
Baron de Montesquieu
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The less men think, the more they talk.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
Baron de Montesquieu