Quotes By Charles De Secondat

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

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.

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.

Power ought to serve as a check to power.

The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles.

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

You have to study a great deal to know a little.

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

Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.

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.

Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.

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

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.

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

Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

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.

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

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

Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans.

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?

Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

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.