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The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
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More quotes by Baron de Montesquieu

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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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A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.
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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Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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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In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Man is a social animal formed to please in society.
Baron de Montesquieu
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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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
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.
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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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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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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Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?
Baron de Montesquieu
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...when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can only come from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.
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.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Vitam Impendere Vero (I consecrate my life to truth).
Baron de Montesquieu
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The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf.
Baron de Montesquieu