Top 200 Baron de Montesquieu Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

152. “The state is the association of men, and not men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

153. “They who love to inform themselves, are never idle. Though I have no business of consequence to take care of, I am nevertheless continually employed. I spend my life in examining things: I write down in the evening whatever I have remarked, what I have seen, and what I have heard in the day: every thing engages my attention, and every thing excites my wonder: I am like an infant, whose organs, as yet tender, are strongly affected by the slightest objects.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

154. “Human laws made to direct the will ought to give precepts, and not counsels.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

155. “I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

156. “When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

157. “If you run after wit, you will succeed in catching folly.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

158. “The political men of Greece who lived under popular government recognized no other force to sustain it than virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufacturing, commerce, finance, wealth, and even luxury.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

159. “Political liberty exists only when there is no abuse of power.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

160. “There is no tyranny more cruel than that which is exercised within the shade of the law and with the colours of justice.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

161. “At the birth of societies, it is leaders of republics who bring about the institution, and thereafter it is the institution that forms the leaders of the republic.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

162. “Zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfill its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

163. “Religion cannot be successfully attacked by filling men’s souls with fear, for it is at just this time that religion matters most to them.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

164. “Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

165. “In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

166. “A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

167. “Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

168. “Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

169. “The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

170. “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.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

171. “What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

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

— Baron de Montesquieu

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

— Baron de Montesquieu

174. “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.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

175. “Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

176. “When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

177. “Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

178. “The alms given to a naked man in the street do not fulfil the obligations of the state, which owes to every citizen a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

179. “Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

180. “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.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

181. “False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

182. “There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

183. “The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

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

— Baron de Montesquieu

185. “Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

186. “I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced wars; it is the intolerant spirit animating that which believed itself in the ascendant.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

187. “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.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

188. “Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

189. “The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

190. “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

191. “What cowardice it is to be dismayed by the happiness of others and devastated by there good fortune.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

192. “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

193. “It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

194. “What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

195. “With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing: one must also make them felt. Of such kind are moral truths.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

196. “Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

197. “I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

198. “Christianity stamped its character on jurisprudence; for empire has ever a connection with the priesthood.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

199. “Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.”

— Baron de Montesquieu

200. “The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.”

— Baron de Montesquieu