Montesquieu Quotes

128 Sourced Quotes

In moderate states, there is a compensation for heavy taxes; it is liberty. In despotic states, there is an equivalent for liberty; it is the modest taxes.

Montesquieu
[The Ottoman Empire] whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.

Montesquieu
Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.

Montesquieu
A prince who loves and fears religion is a lion who stoops to the hand that strokes or to the voice that appeases him. He who fears and hates religion is like the savage beast that growls and bites the chain, which prevents his flying on the passenger. He who has no religion at all is that terrible animal who perceives his liberty only when he tears in pieces, and when he devours.

Montesquieu
Brutes are deprived of the high advantages which we have; but they have some which we have not. They have not our hopes, but theyare without our fears; they are subject like us to death, but without knowing it; even most of them are more attentive than we to self-preservation, and do not make so bad a use of their passions.

Montesquieu
They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings.

Montesquieu
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.

Montesquieu
To lend money without interest, is certainly an action laudable and extremely good; but it is obvious, that it is only a counsel of religion, and not a civil law.

Montesquieu
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.

Montesquieu
The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.

Montesquieu
Each particular society begins to feel its strength, whence arises a state of war between different nations.

Montesquieu
Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.

Montesquieu
Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

Montesquieu
The crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom.

Montesquieu
A love of the republic in a democracy is a love of the democracy, as the latter is that of equality. A love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality. Since every individual ought here to enjoy the same happiness, and the same advantages, they should consequently taste the same pleasures and form the same hopes, which cannot be expected but from a general frugality.

Montesquieu
Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.

Montesquieu
Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

Montesquieu
As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

Montesquieu
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.

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

Montesquieu
There is no word that has admitted of more various significations, and has made more different impressions on human minds, than that of Liberty. Some have taken it for a facility of deposing a person on whom they had conferred a tyrannical authority; others for the power of choosing a person whom they are obliged to obey; others for the right of bearing arms, and of being thereby enabled to use violence, others in fine for the privilege of being governed by a native of their own country or by their own laws.

Montesquieu
The power of divorce can be given only to those who feel the inconveniences of marriage, and who are sensible of the moment when it is for their interest to make them cease.

Montesquieu
Mankind by their industry, and by the influence of good laws, have rendered the earth more proper for their abode.

Montesquieu
At our coming into the world, we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.

Montesquieu
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.

Montesquieu
The English are busy; they don't have time to be polite.

Montesquieu
Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.

Montesquieu
The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests.

Montesquieu
It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

Montesquieu
Virtue in a republic is the love of one's country, that is the love of equality.

Montesquieu