Charles De Secondat 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.

Power ought to serve as a check to power.

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.

The object of war is victory; that of victory is conquest; and that of conquest preservation.

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

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.

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.

In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.

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

Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.

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

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

Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.

Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

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.

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

Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance ... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.

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.

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.