Montesquieu Quotes

128 Sourced Quotes

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

Montesquieu
There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude... we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.

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
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books!

Montesquieu
The laws do not take upon them to punish any other than overt acts.

Montesquieu
And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool.

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

Montesquieu
Thou knowest that ever since the invention of gunpowder…I continually tremble lest men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abolishing mankind, of annihilating peoples and nations in their entirety.

Montesquieu