Top 200 Baron de Montesquieu Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Virtue has needs of limits.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

102. “There are three species of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

103. “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

104. “This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

105. “The reason the Romans built their great paved highways was because they had such inconvenient footwear.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

106. “I shall ever repeat it, that mankind are governed not by extremes, but by principals of moderation.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

107. “Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

108. “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.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

109. “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

110. “Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one’s wit at the expense of one’s better nature.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

111. “In the matter of dress one should always keep below one’s ability.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

112. “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.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

113. “If you would be holy, instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed to you.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

114. “There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

115. “Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

116. “Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!”

— Baron de Montesquieu

117. “Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

118. “Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

119. “C est le tyran qui m outrage, et non pas celui qui exerce la tyrannie.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

120. “Knowledge makes men gentle; reason leads to humanity; but prejudices can only eradicate both these dispositions.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

121. “Very good laws may be ill timed.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

122. “In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of states who give it its special character; and afterward it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

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

— Baron de Montesquieu

124. “Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

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

— Baron de Montesquieu

126. “Wonderful maxim: not to talk of things any more after they are done.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

127. “Although born in a prosperous realm, we did not believe that its boundaries should limit our knowledge, and that the lore of the East should alone enlighten us.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

128. “When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

129. “Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

130. “I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was impossible for me to execute myself.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

131. “When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

132. “People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

133. “Slowness is frequently the cause of much greater slowness.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

134. “Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

135. “Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

136. “It is difficult for the united states to be all of equal power and extent.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

137. “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.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

138. “In a republic there is no coercive force as in other governments, the laws must therefore endeavor to supply this defect.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

139. “One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

140. “There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

141. “Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

142. “The pagan religion, which prohibited only some of the grosser crimes, and which stopped the hand but meddled not with the heart, might have crimes that were inexplicable.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

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

— Baron de Montesquieu

144. “Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

145. “I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

146. “In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

147. “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

148. “As men are affected in all ages by the same passions, the occasions which bring about great changes are different, but the causes are always the same.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

149. “When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

150. “I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.”

— Baron de Montesquieu