Montesquieu Quotes on Politics
Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) gave eighteenth-century political philosophy its most influential comparative analysis of constitutions. The famous typology — republic (further divided into democracy and aristocracy), monarchy, despotism — is correlated with the principle (virtue, honor, fear) that animates each form, and with the geographic, climatic, and economic conditions of the political community in question. The doctrine of the separation of powers — legislative, executive, and judicial functions distributed across separate institutions checking one another — supplies the constitutional architecture that the Federalist Papers and the United States Constitution would translate into practice, and remains the canonical philosophical case for the institutional design Montesquieu pioneered.
Quotes
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Attributed to Montesquieu:
“Liberty is the right to do what the laws permit.”
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“Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.”
Book XXIX: Of the Manner of Composing Laws, Chapter 16: Things to be Observed in the Composing of Laws -
Attributed to Montesquieu:
“There is no nation so powerful as the one that obeys its laws.”
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Attributed to Montesquieu:
“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”
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Attributed to Montesquieu:
“When power is constant, free states will not last.”
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Attributed to Montesquieu:
“Mankind has been corrupted, and an admirable lesson is given by the law that obliges the rulers themselves to obey it.”
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“The laws of Rome had wisely divided public power among a large number of magistracies, which supported, checked and tempered each other. Since they all had only limited power, every citizen was qualified for them, and the people — seeing many persons pass before them one after the other — did not grow accustomed to any in particular. But in these times the system of the republic changed. Through the people the most powerful men gave themselves extraordinary commissions — which destroyed the authority of the people and magistrates, and placed all great matters in the hands of one man, or a few.”
Chapter XI. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] -
“No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice — when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.”
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline(1876) | See Chap. XIV of Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence . Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89. Quoted in