Montesquieu - Liberty Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

View all Montesquieu Quotes
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.

Montesquieu
Lands produce less by reason of their fertility than by reason of the liberty of their inhabitants.

Montesquieu
Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Is it not strange, though true, to say that virtue itself has need of limits?

Montesquieu
The gods have attached almost as many misfortunes to liberty as to servitude.

Montesquieu
Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.

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

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

Montesquieu