Montesquieu Quotes

After Montesquieu, the next great addition to Sociology (which is the term I may be allowed to invent to designate Social Physics) was made by Condorcet, proceeding on the views suggested by his illustrious friend Turgot. (Auguste Comte)

I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. It places the governors indeed more at their ease at the expense of the people. The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given much more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen States in the course of eleven years is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of the government prevent insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier but less despotic, as Montesquieu supposes, than in some other countries and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts.

Thomas Jefferson

Pride is not a wise counselor. People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world. The absence of any obstacle to the deployment of strength is dangerous for the strong themselves: passion takes precedence over reason. "No power without limit can be legitimate," as Montesquieu wrote long ago. Political wisdom does not consist in seeking only immediate victory, nor does it require systematic preference of "us" over "them."

Tzvetan Todorov

When a nice quote comes to mind, I always attribute it to Montesquieu, or to La Rochefoucauld. They've never complained.

Indro Montanelli

Dialogue in Hell: Twenty-First Dialogue Machiavelli: I am afraid that you are somewhat prejudiced against loans;... modern economists today expressly recognize that, far from impoverishing the state, public debts enrich it. Will you allow me to explain how? Montesquieu:.... I should first of all like to know from whom you will ask so much capital, and for what reason you will ask it. Machiavelli: For that, foreign wars are a great help. In the great states, they permit the borrowing of five or six hundred millions; one manages so as to spend only half or two-thirds, and the rest finds its place in the treasury for domestic expenditures.

Will Eisner

Dialogue in Hell: Thirteenth Dialogue Machiavelli: This is because you do not understand, Montesquieu! How much impotence and even simplicity is found among the majority of men of European demagoguism. These tigers have souls of sheep, heads full of wind. Their dream is the absorption of the individual into a symbolic unity. They demand the complete realization of equality.

Will Eisner

Dialogue in Hell: Seventeenth Dialogue Montesquieu:... Now I understand the apologue the god Vishnu; you have a hundred arms like the Hindu idol and each one of your fingers touches a spring. In the same way that you touch everything, are you also able to see everything? Machiavelli: Yes, for I shall make of the police an institution so vast that in the heart of my kingdom half of the people shall see the other half... ...If, as I scarcely doubt, I succeed in attaining this result, here are some of the forms by which my police would manifest themselves abroad: men of pleasure and good company in the foreign courts, to keep an eye on the intrigues of the princes and of the exiled pretenders...the establishment of political newspapers in the great capitals, printers and book stores places in the same conditions and secretly subsidized.

Will Eisner

Dialogue in Hell: Ninth Dialogue Machiavelli: And where have you ever seen that a constitution, really worthy of the name, really durable, has ever been the result of popular deliberation? A constitution must come forth fully armed from the head of one man alone, or it is nothing but a work condemned to oblivion. Without homogeneity, without linking of parties, without practical strength, it will necessarily bear the imprint of all the weaknesses of sight that have presided at its composition.... Montesquieu: ...One would say, to hear you, that you are going to draw a people out of chaos or out of the deep night of their first origins.... Machiavelli: I do not say no: therefore you will see that I need not destroy your institutions from top to bottom to arrive at my goal. It will suffice me to modify the arrangements and to change the methods.

Will Eisner

It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.

Antonio Negri

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book.

Thomas Edison

In generating the first ever systematic account of the market mechanism in commercial society, Smith's political economy drew not only on his critical reflections of the unsytematic nature of earlier economic writing, but equally on his didactic revisions of earlier natural law and natural jurisprudence traditions as well as the empirically suggestive but unsystematic historical inductive method of tracing the progress of civil society previously introduced by thinkers such as the great Montesquieu. These revisions can be linked directly to Smith's political thinking. It may be questioned whether Adam Smith can be said to have developed a political theory. Certainly, it has been and yet remains a subject of debate. Unquestionably, however, Smith isolated important political concerns and made political conceptual contributions which he linked systematically to his theory of commercial society and the conduct of the market. (Adam Smith)