Charles de Secondat quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

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

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

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

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

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

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

Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.

A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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