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.
I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.
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?
The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.
To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.
If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman... because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.
In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.
If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
The object of war is victory; that of victory is conquest; and that of conquest preservation.
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.
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.
The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.
Peace is a natural effect of trade.
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.
But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans.
Power ought to serve as a check to power.
In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.
The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.
An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.
Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
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.
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.
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.
To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.
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.
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.
Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.
There should be weeping at a man's birth, not at his death.