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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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Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
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The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.
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A fondness for reading changes the inevitable dull hours of our life into exquisite hours of delight.
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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.
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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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Man is a social animal formed to please in society.
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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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If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
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Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
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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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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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There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
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I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
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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.
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The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.
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Great commanders write their actions with simplicity because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
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Honor sets all the parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very action connects them thus each individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own interest.
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We must have constantly present in our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would no longer be possessed of liberty.
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There is as yet no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from legislative power and the executrix
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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