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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.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
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More quotes by Baron de Montesquieu

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The severity of the laws prevents their execution.
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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.
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Republics end through luxury monarchies through poverty.
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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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A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Wonderful maxim: not to talk of things any more after they are done.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.
Baron de Montesquieu
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I should like to abolish funerals the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Luxury ruins republics poverty, monarchies.
Baron de Montesquieu
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You have to study a great deal to know a little.
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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There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
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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I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.
Baron de Montesquieu
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No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ.
Baron de Montesquieu