"Montesquieu" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that great instrument. They not only knew that common law, but they had studied closely the political history of Greece and Rome, and were familiar with the principles of government as set forth by Montesquieu and Adam Smith. ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire, even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much more wisely about European civilization than an American of San Francisco. The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or even natural taste, in ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... states that "A letter was delivered to the First Consul by Lebrun who received it from the Abbe de Montesquieu, the secret agent of the Bourbons in Paris." This letter which was very cautiously ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... intrusion of astrological arguments, it is a new step in the study of universal history. [Footnote: Climates and geography. The fullest discussion will be found in the Republique, Book v. cap. i. Here Bodin anticipated Montesquieu. There was indeed nothing new in the principle; it had been recognised by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and other Greeks, and in a later age ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... part of his romance, which appeared in 1580,[91] Lyly gives a kind of Lettres persanes, but Lettres persanes reversed, Montesquieu making use of his foreigner to satirize France, and Lyly of his to eulogize his native land. Euphues comes to England with his friend Philautus, and, since he knows everything, instructs the latter as they go along. ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... I should rather say the Marchioness of Boscofolto, since the Duke has just bestowed on her the fief of that name, is impatient to make your acquaintance; and since you doubtless remember the saying of the Marquis de Montesquieu, that to know a ruler one must know his confessor and his mistress, you will perhaps be glad to seize ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... I conceive that without Liberty and Equality, there cannot exist that tranquillity of mind, which results from the assurance of every citizen, that his own personal safety and rights are secure:—This, I think is a sentiment of the celebrated Montesquieu; and it is the end and design of all free and lawful Governments. Such assurance, impressed upon the heart of each, would lead to the peace, order and happiness of all. For I should think, no man, in the exercise of his reason would be inclined in ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... supposed that they are meagre, for they will be found to present a clear and comprehensive view of the existing information upon the particular topic, with a mastery which arises only from familiarity. Montesquieu said that Tacitus abridged all because he knew all; and no reader can peruse a number of this Encyclopaedia without being convinced that the success in preparing the perspicuous abridgments it contains ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... please at the idea of heart in politics; but if history teaches anything, it teaches that human progress is possible only because the benevolent instincts of the heart are permanent, while the reasonings of the head are shifting. "When God," says Montesquieu, "endowed human beings with brains, he did not intend to guaranty them." And the sarcasm of the French philosopher is fully justified, when we reflect that nothing mean, base, or cruel has ever been done in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the political acts of our ancestors, we have a right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of our own. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clue to the labyrinth in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther into the mysteries of social and political organization than Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... said, "the spirit of the age. We are highly irreligious in France; impiety is deeply rooted in our soil. You do not know the progress achieved by the ideas of Montesquieu, Raynal and Rousseau. Public worship is abolished; veneration is a thing of the past. You must have seen this from the scandalous talk my officers indulged in just ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... is as old as Homer. Its laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a convert. One of the prose hints for his noble fragment of a didactic poem runs thus: "It is the proper work of education ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... felt quite sure that they would have to establish civil government there. So he made up an excellent collection of books,—De Lolme on the British Constitution; Montesquieu on Laws; Story, Kent, John Adams, and all the authorities here; with ten copies of his own address delivered before the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society of Podunk, on the "Abnormal Truths of Social Order." He telegraphed to know what night he should ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... continued to the present day. Like yellow fever, phthisis, and some diseases, as well as many other social afflictions and customs, eunuchism does not seem to flourish beyond certain degrees of north and south latitudes,—a fact that probably assisted Montesquieu to arrive at the conclusion that climate was a ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... regard to women, that he had a great number of these women in his family, and that his women and the women attendant upon the persons of his favorites had increased to a very great number. We know that his sons amounted to twenty,—or, according to Mr. Hastings's own account, to nineteen. Montesquieu supposes that there are more females born in the East than in the West. But he says this upon no good ground. We know by better and more regular information concerning this matter, that the birth of males and females ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... in a great movement which had begun in France. The brilliant theories of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Dalembert—containing much truth and many heresies—were felt in England, and had given a new impetus to English intellect; indeed, it is not strange, when we come to consider, that while Richardson's works ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... to be the result of the injustice which women suffer by polygamy; for it seems to reign, as much in Constantinople, and in every other place where polygamy is in fashion, as it does on the banks of the Ganges, or the Indus. The famous Montesquieu, whose system was, that the passions are entirely regulated by the climate, brings as a proof of this system, a story from the collection of voyages for the establishment of an East India Company, in which it is said, that at Patan, "the wanton ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... implies the formation of a corporate memory. Masses of records had already been accumulated by antiquaries who had constructed rather annals than history, in which the series of events was given without much effort to arrange them in literary form or trace the causal connection. In France, however, Montesquieu had definitely established the importance of applying the historical method to political problems; and Voltaire had published some of his brilliant surveys which attempt to deal with the social characteristics as well as the mere records of battles and conquests. Hume's History, admirably written, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... plain for controversy. It has received the sanction of all the great teachers of political wisdom, from an Aristotle down to a Montesquieu, and from a Montesquieu down to a Burke. It has become, indeed, one of the commonplaces of political ethics; and, however strange the conjunction, it is often found in the very works which are loudest in proclaiming the universal equality of human rights. Thus, for example, says ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment,—whilst he, the economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that, in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even soared above themselves. It is here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative series, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... earned enough for her support. When she had recovered, she gave him her heart and hand in marriage, though she had not a sou of dowry. She was older than he, but was a woman of many virtues. Madame Guizot was an intimate friend of the Abbe Montesquieu, who was the principal secret agent of Louis XVIII. As soon as Guizot was married, he was let into these secrets, and became private secretary to the abbe. He was in the habit of meeting the friends of the restoration every evening at a club, and he did not hesitate to take a bold part in its proceedings. ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... fetch in the first respectable-looking man from the street, and prove to him that literary study tends, as Bacon requires, "to civilize the life of man"; prove to him that, as Montesquieu requires, it "increases the excellence of our nature, and makes an understanding being yet more understanding," and the man—type though he may be of the modern practical age—will admit your claim and applaud ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, was born near Bordeaux, in France, Jan. 18, 1689. For ten years he was president of the Bordeaux court of justice, but it was the philosophy of laws that interested him rather than the administration of them. He travelled over Europe ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Philosophical, legal, and constitutional treatises bearing on history, e.g., Bryce's American Commonwealth; Ostrogorski's Democracy and The Party System; Montesquieu's The ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... an array of ingenious arguments, and with fatal facility and apparent precision he deduces from his unfounded premises a series of inconsequent conclusions, which he regards as authoritative and universally applicable. At times he becomes less rigid, as when (under the influence of Montesquieu) he studies the relations between the physical constitution of a nation, its territory, its customs, its form of government, and its deep-rooted opinions, or avows that there has been too much dispute ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... agreeable to Louis XV., whom the petulant poet so strongly repelled by the vivacity and even the familiarity of his praises. She thought she had found a genius in Crebillon and honoured him accordingly. She showed favour to Gresset; she protected Marmontel; she welcomed Duclos; she admired Montesquieu and plainly showed it. She would have liked to serve Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When the King of Prussia ostentatiously gave d'Alembert a modest pension and Louis XV. was scoffing in her presence at the amount (1200 livres), ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... this, her reading at this epoch was without any order or method. She read everything voraciously, mixing all the philosophers up together. She read Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, but she kept Rousseau apart from the others. She devoured the books of the moralists and poets, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare. All this reading was too much for her and excited her brain. She had reserved Chateaubriand's ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of 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 ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... notably David Hume and Charles Comte, C. Montesquieu in his L'Esprit des Lois, and Henry Thomas Buckle in his HISTORY OF CIVILISATION IN ENGLAND, have dilated upon the influence which climate exerts over race, and all their forceful opinions are to the effect that the character of a ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of the world, when it is not sucked in with mother's milk and part of the inheritance of descent, is only acquired by education, supplemented by certain gifts of chance—a graceful figure, distinction ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... in this connection to note how Montesquieu, in his "Spirit of Laws," treats this color argument with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Godwin) "from Judge Blackstone of a geometrical progression would much more naturally apply to Montesquieu's hypothesis of the depopulation of the world, and prove that the human species is hastening fast to extinction, than to the purpose for which Mr. Malthus has employed it. An ingenious sophism might be raised upon it, to shew that the race of mankind will ultimately ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... not, however, until a few years after the death of the great king that a volume appeared which contained a complete expression of the new spirit, in all its aspects. In the Lettres Persanes of MONTESQUIEU (published 1721) may be discerned the germs of the whole thought of the eighteenth century in France. The scheme of this charming and remarkable book was not original: some Eastern travellers were supposed to arrive in Paris, and to describe, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... oppressor and the slave; Cruelty the product of arbitrary power; Testimony of Thomas Jefferson; Judge Tucker; Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina, and Georgia; General William H. Harrison; President Edwards; Montesquieu; Wilberforce; Whitbread; Characters. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... perfectibility, succeeded in slowly permeating the dull toiling masses of France with hope. Omitting here any notice of philosophic speculation as such, we may briefly notice the teachings of three writers whose influence on revolutionary politics was to be definite and practical. These were Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. The first was by no means a revolutionist, for he decided in favour of a mixed form of government, like that of England, which guaranteed the State against the dangers of autocracy, oligarchy, and mob-rule. Only ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Principles of Political Justice, which necessarily grew out of the cultivation of reason, and which were corollaries of that INTELLECTUAL PHILOSOPHY of which Bacon laid the foundation, and which has been matured by Selden, Coke, Milton, Sidney, Locke, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Rousseau, D'alembert, Hume, De Lolme, Mirabeau, and Fox. Rights of social man derived from such sources cannot be overwhelmed, though a divided people may have been overpowered, though ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... this society woman began to be felt as a political force. M. Brunetiere said: "Mme. de Lambert made Academicians; the Marquise de Prie made a queen of France; Mme. de Tencin made cardinals and ambassadors." Montesquieu wrote: "There is not a person who has any employment at the court in Paris or in the provinces, who has not the influence (and sometimes the injustices which she can cause) of a woman through whom all favors pass;" and M. Brunetiere added: ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... provision is likely to be underestimated. Says Montesquieu, "Liberty consists in security. This security is never more attacked than in public and private accusations. It is, therefore, upon the excellence of the criminal laws that chiefly the liberty of the ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... exactly alike, they only differ in their mode of expression. Their methods are also different: Hobbes relies on sophism; Grotius relies on the poets; they are agreed in everything else. In modern times the only man who could have created this vast and useless science was the illustrious Montesquieu. But he was not concerned with the principles of political law; he was content to deal with the positive laws of settled governments; and nothing could be more different than these ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Turgot's opinion upon the manuscript of a work composed, as so many others were, after the pattern of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes,—now nearly thirty years old,—and bearing the accurately imitative title of Lettres Peruviennes. A Peruvian comes to Europe, and sends to a friend or mistress in Peru a series of remarks on civilisation. Goldsmith's delightful Citizen ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... denominations? Every government then in existence assumed to itself the right to legislate in matters of religion; and to restrain heresy by penal statutes. This right was claimed by rulers, admitted by subjects, and is sanctioned by the names of Lord Bacon and Montesquieu, and many others equally famed for their talents and learning. It is unjust then, to 'press upon one poor persecuted sect, the sins of all christendom?' The fault of our fathers was the fault of the age; and though this cannot justify, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Goldsmith wrote the 'Reverie at the Boar's Head Tavern' and the 'Adventures of a Strolling Player,' besides a number of minor papers. For Newbery, by a happy recollection of the 'Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, or some of his imitators, he struck almost at once into that charming epistolary series, brimful of fine observation, kindly satire, and various fancy, which was ultimately to become the English classic known as 'The Citizen ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the "arrogance" with which such a man as Montesquieu is described as "the fanciful Montesquieu," by "an eleemosynary politician, who writes on the subject merely because he has been rewarded for writing ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... constitution which may satisfy the wants and appease the prejudices then actually existing. In spite of such miscalculations as beset all forecasts of the future, they show admirable good sense and clear appreciation. But when they think it necessary to appeal to Montesquieu, to tag their arguments from common sense with little ornamental formulae learnt from philosophical writings, they show a very amiable simplicity; but they also seem to me to sink at once to the level of a clever prize essay in a university competition. ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... regularly preconceived plan. My view was at first, without regard to system and strict connection, to put down the results of my reflections upon the most important points in quite brief, precise, compact propositions. The manner in which Montesquieu has treated his subject floated before me in idea. I thought that concise, sententious chapters, which I proposed at first to call grains, would attract the attention of the intelligent just as much by that which was to be developed from them, as by that which ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... ostracism, might be excluded from the public councils, cut off and proscribed from the rights of every subject of the realm, not for a term of years alone, but forever. He quoted from "L'Esprit des Lois" an assertion of Montesquieu, that "one of the excellences of the English constitution was, that the judicial power was separated from the legislative, and that there would be no liberty if they were blended together; the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would then be arbitrary, for the judge would ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... voyois bien que votre ame etoit haute; mais je ne soupconnois pas qu'elle fut grande."—Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate.) Considerations ... de la Grandeur des Romains, etc., Paris, 1795, ii. 219. By Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... to a better way. It is not too much to say that at that epoch the strength of political speculation in this country, from Adam Smith downwards, was drawn from France; and Burke had been led to some of what was most characteristic in his philosophy of society by Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws (1748), the first great manual of the historic school. We have no space here to work out the relations between Montesquieu's principles and Burke's, but the student of the Esprit des Lois will recognise its ...
— Burke • John Morley
... the fall of the Roman Empire, it is impossible to overlook the evil that the Chustions, so admirable in the desert, did the state when they were in power. "When I think," said Montesquieu, "of the profound ignorance into which the Greek clergy plunged the laity, I am obliged to compare them to the Scythians of whom Herodotus speaks, who put out the eyes of their slaves in order that nothing might distract their attention from their work. . . . No affair of ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... the mere product of nature. By what strange contradiction is it affirmed at once that our spirit overpasses the bounds of all the realities which encompass it, and that it has not a source more elevated than those realities? Listen to a thought of that weighty writer Montesquieu:[129] "Those who have said that a blind fatality has produced all the effects which we see in the world, have said a great absurdity; for what greater absurdity than a blind fatality which should have produced ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... The attempt to convert an ancient Eastern despotism, firmly established on a theocratic basis, a country in which the Koran and the Multeka are the law of the land, into a Western democracy based on the secular speculations of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Bentham, Mill, and Spencer was ridiculous. The revolution effected only an outward change. It introduced some Western innovations, but altered neither the character of the Government nor that of the people. Turkish Parliamentarism became a sham and a make-believe. The cruel absolutism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... principles which a husband should put into practice, if he wishes to escape mistakes in ruling his little kingdom. Nevertheless, in spite of what was decided by the minority at the council of Macon (Montesquieu, who had perhaps foreseen the coming of constitutional government has remarked, I forget in what part of his writings, that good sense in public assemblies is always found on the side of the minority), we discern in a woman a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... arch-quack, the old serpent, down to the far-famed Stoughton of our own day, does not present so powerful a remedy, amid all its antis, as cheerful reading to a heavy spirit. I will venture to say, in the spirit of Montesquieu, that an hour of such reading will place one quietly in his elbow chair in all the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... lettre de cachet, to the dreary cells of the Bastille. She virtually had the appointment of the prelates of the Church and of the generals of the army; and so great was her ascendency that all persons, whatsoever their rank, found it expedient to pay their homage to her. Even Montesquieu praised her intellect, and Voltaire her beauty, and Maria Theresa wrote flattering letters to her. The prime minister was her tool and agent, since royalty itself yielded to her sway; even the proud ladies of the royal family condescended to flatter ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... soil, the mechanic, the merchant. The samurai derived his income from land and could even indulge, if he had a mind to, in amateur farming; but the counter and abacus were abhorred. We knew the wisdom of this social arrangement. Montesquieu has made it clear that the debarring of the nobility from mercantile pursuits was an admirable social policy, in that it prevented wealth from accumulating in the hands of the powerful. The separation of power and riches kept the distribution of the latter more nearly equable. ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... family a beloved father, we are striving by every honest means in our power to collect the sum necessary for his ransom, and we are not ashamed to employ ourselves for such a purpose in the occupation of watermen." M. de Montesquieu was struck with this account, and on his departure made them a handsome present. Some months afterwards, the young men being at work in their shop, were greatly surprised at the sudden arrival of their father, who threw himself into their arms; exclaiming ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... which sustained their life lasted, with difficulty dragged to the daylight, are expiring beneath the general reprobation; it is suspected that the government of society must be learned no longer from an empty ideology, after the fashion of the Contrat social, but, as Montesquieu foresaw, from the RELATION OF THINGS; and already a Left of eminently socialistic tendencies, composed of savants, magistrates, legists, professors, and even capitalists and manufacturers,—all born representatives ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... accounts which history gives us concerning all nations, bear testimony to these facts."—Blair's Rhet., p. 379; Jamieson's, 300. "Mr. Addison was the first who attempted a regular inquiry" [into the pleasures of taste.]—Blair's Rhet., p. 28. "One of the first who introduced it was Montesquieu."—Murray's Gram., p. 125. "Massillon is perhaps the most eloquent writer of sermons which modern times have produced."—Blair's Rhet., p. 289. "The greatest barber who ever lived, is our guiding star and prototype."—Hart's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... might venture, therefore, to add another to the definitions of Montesquieu, we might say that the principle animating a liberal constitutional government was liberty, and that this involved a definite plan for enlarging the sphere of liberty as the organising principle of civil society. To what then are we to impute the decadence from this type ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... President Montesquieu (whom you will be acquainted with at Paris), after having laid down in his book, 'De l'Esprit des Lois', the nature and principles of the three different kinds of government, viz, the democratical, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... bored me terribly. The next day the guest was a monk who talked literature, and spoke a thousand follies against Voltaire, whom I then much admired, and against the "Esprit des Lois," a favourite work of mine, which the cowled idiot refused to attribute to Montesquieu, maintaining it had been written by a monk. He might as well have said that a Capuchin created the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... position of such moral advantage that within another century the English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon continental Europe. It was the study of English institutions by such men as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and direction to the French Revolution. That violent but wholesome clearing of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its sources in the spirit ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... belong to it have been rehandled in a scientific spirit, and maturely gathered up into a systematic whole along with the rest of our knowledge. This presiding doctrine connects Comte with the social thinkers of the eighteenth century,—indirectly with Montesquieu, directly with Turgot, and more closely than either with Condorcet, of whom he was accustomed to speak ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... and the brilliant successes that study has recently achieved, are due, in great part, to the illustrious representatives of the historical school. We may add, here, that the French historical school, which has so worthily inherited the spirit of Montesquieu, has not achieved less in this direction than the older German school. It has reconciled the opposing but not mutually hostile, tendencies of Savigny and Thibaut. It has conscientiously scrutinized facts to show their concatenation, and to allow their meaning and bearing to be clearly ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... prevalent, that maritime commerce is incompatible with nobility." But a prejudice involving conscious and open superiority is not readily effaced by ordinances, especially when vanity is a conspicuous trait in national character; and many years later Montesquieu taught that it is contrary to the spirit of monarchy that the nobility ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... indigence imparts to all unfortunates. These two emotions seemed to have made crevices in that solidly constructed face which the pickaxe of poverty was daily enlarging. The mouth was eloquent and grave; in that feature Don Quixote was complicated with Montesquieu's president. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... never owned a printing-press[1] during the French regime, references were made by the congress that assembled at Philadelphia in September in 1774, to the writings of Beccaria and the spirit of the "immortal Montesquieu." The delegates attacked the Quebec Act as an exhibition of Roman Catholic tyranny at the very time they were asking the aid and sympathy of French Canadians in the struggle for independence. A few weeks later the same congress ignored the ill-advised address ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... far, that Townshend brought Chesterfield over from the Hague, last Autumn;—a Baron de Montesquieu, with the ESPRIT DE LOIS in his head, sailed with Lord Chesterfield on that occasion, and is now in England "for two years;"—but Chesterfield could not be made Secretary; industrious Duke of Newcastle stuck so close by that office, and by the skirts of Walpole. Chesterfield and ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... a dozen volumes on the chair beside him and left the room. Neal took them up one by one. There was a volume of "Voltaire," Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," "The Vindiciae Gallicae," by Mackintosh, Godwin's "Political Justice," Montesquieu's "Esprit des Lois," and a volume of Burns' poetry, not long out from a Belfast printer. Neal already knew Godwin's works and the "Esprit des Lois." They stood on his father's bookshelves. He glanced at the pages of the others, and finally settled down to ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... MONTESQUIEU, BARON DE, illustrious French publicist, born in the Chateau La Brede, near Bordeaux; his greatest work, and an able, "Esprit des Lois," though rated in "Sartor" as at best the work of "a clever infant spelling letters from a hieroglyphic ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... have supplied facts for such a work as that of Montesquieu? He indeed has been, perhaps justly, charged with abusing this advantage, by the undistinguishing adoption of the narratives of travellers of very different degrees of accuracy and veracity. But if we reluctantly confess the ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... birthright." And Florus, speaking of liberty, said: "It is a privilege which nature has granted to the Germans, and which the Greeks, with all of their arts, knew not how to obtain." At a later period Montesquieu was led to exclaim: "Liberty, that lovely thing, was discovered in the wild forests of Germany." While Hume, viewing the results of this discovery, said: "If our part of the world maintains sentiments of liberty, honor, equity, and valor superior to the rest ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... being both from 'discerno,' they signify the power of so seeing things that in the seeing we distinguish and separate them one from another. [Footnote: L'esprit consiste a connaitre la ressemblance des choses diverses, et la difference des choses semblables (Montesquieu). Saint-Evremond says of a reunion of the Precieuses at the Hotel Rambouillet, with a raillery which is not meant to be disrespectful— 'La se font distinguer les fiertes des rigueurs, Les dedains des mepris, les tourments des langueurs; On y sait demeler ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... article is nobody, and the chap that speaks in the House of Commons is a hero. Lord, Lord, how the world is 'umbugged! Pop'lar representation! what IS pop'lar representation? Dammy, it's a farce. Hallo! this article is stole! I remember a passage in Montesquieu uncommonly like it. [Goes and gets the book. As he is standing upon sofa to get it, and sitting down to read it, MISS PRIOR and the Children have come in at the garden. Children pass across stage. MISS PRIOR enters by open window, bringing flowers ...
— The Wolves and the Lamb • William Makepeace Thackeray
... most celebrated for their understanding and patriotism took up the defence of Napoleon: but in vain did they quote Delolme, Blackstone, Montesquieu; and demonstrate, that no modern state, no republic, had possessed such liberal and beneficial laws: their eloquence and their erudition were without success. The contemners of the additional act, deaf to the voice of reason, would judge of it only from its title; and as ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... nearer to the meaning of one verse, if, as soon as you are puzzled by it, you escape to another, introducing three new words—'law,' 'members,' and 'mind'; not one of which you at present know the meaning of; and respecting which, you probably never will be much wiser; since men like Montesquieu and Locke have spent great part of their lives in endeavouring ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... phrases, to follow without a breath the happy swiftness of that fine-spun thread of thought. Then at moments her wit crystallised; the cataract threw off a shower of radiant jewels, which one caught as one might. Some of these have come down to us. Her remark on Montesquieu's great book—'C'est de l'esprit sur les lois'—is an almost final criticism. Her famous 'mot de Saint Denis,' so dear to the heart of Voltaire, deserves to be once more recorded. A garrulous and credulous Cardinal was describing the martyrdom of Saint Denis the Areopagite: when his ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... soldiers. The desire of glory has ever characterized the nation, and the state of tyranny and oppression in which they were kept under his government, had no effect in diminishing this passion. The French people under Napoleon furnish a striking exception to the maxim of Montesquieu, when he says, [22]"On peut poser pour maxime, que dans chaque etat le desir de la gloire existe avec la liberte de sujets, et diminue avec elle; la gloire n'est jamais ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Raynal, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, have treated of Paraguay under Jesuit rule, but their writings are founded on hearsay evidence. A German, Father Dobrizhoffer, stands alone.* His delightful 'History of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay', is perhaps the most charming book ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... order, il sue particolare and virtu, individuality and ability (energy, political genius, prowess, vital force: virtu is impossible to translate, and only does not mean virtue), were the dominating and unrelenting factors of life. Niccolo Machiavelli, unlike Montesquieu, agreed with Martin Luther that man was bad. It was for both the Wittenberger and the Florentine, in their very separate ways, to found the school and wield the scourge. In the naked and unashamed candour of the time Guicciardini could ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... noble and civilised democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see therefore how justly flattering and profound, and at the same time how ominous, was Montesquieu's saying that the principle of democracy ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of European society, the combat was resorted to. From its decision there was no appeal. God was supposed to nerve the arm of the combatant whose cause was just, and to grant him the victory over his opponent. As Montesquieu well remarks,[51] this belief was not unnatural among a people just emerging from barbarism. Their manners being wholly warlike, the man deficient in courage, the prime virtue of his fellows, was not unreasonably suspected of other vices ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... from parliament to king, during the wars of the Fronde. These were the people of whom he treasured up the smallest memorial, of whom he loved to hear the most trifling anecdote, and for whose likenesses he would have given any price. Of the great French writers of his own time, Montesquieu is the only one of whom he speaks with enthusiasm. And even of Montesquieu he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject thing, Crebillon the younger, a scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull as Rapin. A man must be strangely constituted who can take ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hairdresser said to me this morning, 'Though I am but a poor fellow, I believe as little as the finest gentleman!'" "Unquestionably, the great Revolution draws near to its final completion,—a pas de geant, as Montesquieu said ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... beggary, and overwhelmed by it in vice. Think how many persons have become liars at the gaming table; how many perjured; how many drunkards; how many blasphemers; how many suicides. 'If Europe,' said Montesquieu, 'is to be ruined, it will be ruined by gaming.' If the United States are to be ruined, gaming in some of its forms will be a very efficient agent in accomplishing ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... humanity at once an impersonation of the man and an exposition of the American Constitution. If it has never been adopted as a whole, it has proved an unfailing fountain of reforms, suggested by its principles.' Mr. Livingston will live historically with such men as Bacon, Montesquieu, Beccaria, and Bentham. His great work in its final form was styled 'A System of Penal Law,' and was divided into 'A Code of Crimes and Punishments,' 'A Code of Procedure,' 'A Code of Evidence,' and 'A Code of Reform and Prison Discipline,' besides ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is a land of despotism. They haven't any rights. Don't you know the fine definition Montesquieu gives of despotism. 'Like the savage, it cuts down the tree to gather the fruits.' They don't tax, ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... personal character of Buffon. He was vain and superficial, and given to extravagant speculations. He is reported to have said, "I know but five great geniuses—Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself." His natural vanity was undoubtedly fostered by the adulation which he received from those in authority. He saw his own statue placed in the cabinet of Louis XVI., with the inscription "Majestati Naturae par ingenium." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... World monkeys, indexes, and the like). Buffon's modus operandi saved him from capital blunders. Though inordinately vain—"I know but five great geniuses," he once said; "Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, Montesquieu, and myself"—he was quite conscious of his own limitations, and had the common-sense to entrust to Daubenton the description of the anatomy and other technical matters as to which his own knowledge was comparatively defective. He reserved to himself what may be called the "literary" ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... been looking through the complete works of Montesquieu, and cannot yet make plain to myself the impression left on me by this singular style, with its mixture of gravity and affectation, of carelessness and precision, of strength and delicacy; so full ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... even under the superintendence of the all-accomplished D'Alembert, it continued to be a scene of the fiercest animosities and the basest intrigues. I might cite Piron's epigrams, and Marmontel's memoirs, and Montesquieu's letters. But I hasten ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book.—JOHN MORLEY, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Greeks, we find Hippocrates holding that all regions liable to violent changes of climate produced men of fierce, impetuous and stubborn disposition. "In approaching southern countries," says Montesquieu, "one would believe that morality was being left behind; more ardent passions multiply crimes; each tries to gain from others all the advantages which can minister to these passions." Buckle believes that ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... an active share in the conduct of the affairs of society, but they accomplished stupendous enterprises as long as the victories of the Sultan were the triumphs of the Mohammedan faith. In the present age they are in rapid decay, because their religion is departing, and despotism only remains. Montesquieu, who attributed to absolute power an authority peculiar to itself, did it, as I conceive, an undeserved honor; for despotism, taken by itself, can produce no durable results. On close inspection we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... power from being able to oppress, says Baron Montesquieu,[49] it is requisite that the armies with which it is entrusted should consist of the people, and have the same spirit with the people; as was the case at Rome, till Marius new modeled the legions by enlisting the rabble of Italy, and laid the foundation of all the military tyranny that ensued. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... influence? In France, excerpts from Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau are still read in the schools, but outside of France, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... Montesquieu infers that the law which permits polygamy is physically conformable to the climate of Asia. The season of female beauty precedes that of their reason, and from its prematurity soon decays. The empire of their charms is short. It ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... She was eager that he should come to Russia to superintend the instruction of the young Grand Duke. But D'Alembert was too prudent to go to St. Petersburg, as he was too prudent to go to Berlin. Montesquieu had died five years before her accession, but his influence remained. She habitually called the Spirit of Laws the breviary of kings, and when she drew up her Instruction for a new code, she acknowledged how much she had pillaged from Montesquieu. "I hope," she said, "that ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... and pacific. He values solid gains more than showy magnificence; and knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the importance of good faith. He has a sense of the balance of European power, and anticipates Montesquieu in his theory of the influence of climates on peoples. There is something of pity, something of irony, in the view which he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. Having ascertained how few of the combinations of events ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... equal power, that sort of world-wide reflection which a thinking being might be supposed to make on his first visit to our planet; but the space between—those intermediate generalizations which make the pride of the philosophical historian—he neglects, has no taste for. Such a writer as Montesquieu he holds in manifest antipathy. His History of the French Revolution, like his Chartism, like the work now before us, his Past and Present, is still an appeal to the consciousness of each man, and to the high and eternal laws of justice and of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... winter, two distinguished visitors from the French army came to see him, the Marquis de Chastellux, who wrote a book of "Travels in North America," and the Baron de Montesquieu; and he gave a dinner for them to which he invited Governor Trumbull. In the marquis's book we can read a description of it and of Governor Trumbull as he appeared to these French gentlemen from the ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... to the same animadversions as that of the wife, because it is not evidence of such entire depravity, nor equally injurious in its effects upon the morals, good order, and happiness of domestic life. Montesquieu, Pothier, and Dr. Taylor all insist that the cases of husband and wife ought to be distinguished, and that the violation of the marriage vow, on the part of the wife, is the most mischievous, and the prosecution ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... celebrated campaigns raises a strategic question which it would be difficult to answer by simple assertions founded upon theories. It is, whether the system of central lines loses its advantages when the masses are very large. Agreeing with Montesquieu, that the greatest enterprises fail from the magnitude of the arrangements necessary to consummate them, I am disposed to answer in the affirmative. It is very clear to me that an army of one hundred thousand men, occupying ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... led him to bestow upon her due civility and attention; according to Fontenelle, he constituted himself her homme d'affaires. Another dancer, Mademoiselle Salle, whose charms and graces Voltaire had celebrated in verse, appeared in London with letters of introduction from Fontenelle to Montesquieu, then ambassador at the court of St. James's. It is clear that the ballet-dancers were ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... battalions among the Christians of the north of Greece. And we shall yet see the Australian sweeping before him the indolence of the Birman and the Javanese. This he will owe to the sterility of his fields and the half European blasts of his more salubrious and stringent atmosphere. The maxim of Montesquieu, that "poverty always conquers wealth," solves but half the problem. The true solution is, that the poverty of the soil compels the exertion of a vigour, which severity of climate alone can generate among a people. For three hundred years the population of Jutland and Denmark ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... [Footnote 37: Montesquieu is declared by Mr. Saintsbury to deserve the title of "the greatest man of letters of the French eighteenth century." He places him above Voltaire because "of his far greater originality and depth ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... any general "degeneration of the race." It maybe added that the notion that the golden age lay in the past, and that our own age is degenerate is not confined to a few biometricians of to-day; it has commended itself to uncritical minds in all ages, even the greatest, as far back as we can go. Montesquieu referred to this common notion (and attempted to explain it) in his Pensees Diverses: "Men have such a bad opinion of themselves," he adds, "that they have believed not only that their minds and souls were degenerate, but ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Frenchman G R Basseville, agent of the republic at Rome M R General Marquis de la Fayette, ex-constituent I R General Winphen, ex-constituent P L The Marquis d'Angremont G L De Blackmann, major of the Swiss guards G L De Cazotte, a man of letters, upwards of 80 years of age G R General Montesquieu, ex-constituent P R The celebrated Count Mirabeau, expelled from the pantheon. (Depantheonise.) R Chabroud, advocate to the Duke of Orleans, ex-constituent P D Le Comte de Tally Tollendal, ex-constituent P D Le Comte de Cazales, ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... general assemblies. If from the South came the romantic admiration of woman, from the North came a better respect for her rights and the sense of her equality. Our trial by jury was immediately derived from Scandinavia; and, according to Montesquieu, as we have seen, we owe to the North, as the greatest inheritance of all, that desire for freedom which is so chief an ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Warren Hastings. There this first awakening consciousness of an Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form indeed. Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of history at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus. In religion he revered the traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His literary sympathies were less varied, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... reformers—have maintained the social advantages of divorce by mutual consent, or, under guarded circumstances, at the wish of one party. Mutual consent was the corner-stone of Milton's conception of marriage. Montesquieu said that true divorce must be the result of mutual consent and based on the impossibility of living together. Senancour seems to agree with Montesquieu. Lord Morley (Diderot, vol. ii, Ch. I), echoing and approving ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... its love of the splendors of the state. Would it be sage, would it be safe, to indulge with democratic equality a sex which already had its eyes on the flattering inequality of monarchy? Perhaps at this point we should digress a little and mention Montesquieu, whose delightful Spirit of Laws we have lately been reading. We should remind the reader, who would like to think he had read him too, how Montesquieu distinguishes between the principles on which the three sorts of government ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... was the Roman Catholic hierarchy,—had been the dominant fashion under Louis XIV. Infidelity was a broad literary mark, written all over the face of the eighteenth century. It was the hour and power of the Encyclopaedists and the Philosophers,—of Voltaire, of Diderot, of D'Alembert, of Rousseau. Montesquieu, though contemporary, belongs apart from these writers. More really original, more truly philosophical, he was far less revolutionary, far less destructive, than they. Still, his influence was, on the whole, exerted in the direction, if not of infidelity, at least of religious ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... pulpit, and failed there too. And then he tried poetry, and succeeded. Fontenelle and Voltaire both failed at the bar. So Cowper, through his diffidence and shyness, broke down when pleading his first cause, though he lived to revive the poetic art in England. Montesquieu and Bentham both failed as lawyers, and forsook the bar for more congenial pursuits—the latter leaving behind him a treasury of legislative procedure for all time. Goldsmith failed in passing ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the uttermost length that aphorism of Montesquieu's, 'Happy the people whose annals are tiresome,' has said, 'Happy the people whose annals are vacant.' In which saying, mad as it looks, may there not still be found some grain of reason? For truly, as it has been written, 'Silence is divine,' and of Heaven; so in all earthly things ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... who was also wandering in obscurity and exile, at this time wrote to General Montesquieu, who was a friend of the Duke of Chartres, and a gentleman possessed of much influence ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... built on wholly different principles, drawn mostly from the French speculations of that age. Especially one notes, alongside of the careful and wise separation of the judiciary from the executive, the sound principle enunciated by Montesquieu and other French thinkers of the eighteenth century, but rejected and contemned by England (to her great hurt) as a piece of impracticable logic—the separation of the executive and legislative powers. It was this principle which made possible the later transformation ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... Cartesians, about to disappear, Fontenelle is an excellent mathematician, the competent biographer of all eminent men of science, the official secretary and true representative of the Academy of Sciences. In other places, in the Academy of Bordeaux, Montesquieu reads discourses on the mechanism of the echo, and on the use of the renal glands; he dissects frogs, tests the effect of heat and cold on animated tissues, and publishes observations on plants and insects.—Rousseau, the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... organization. They could not read Voltaire without a clearer perception of abuses and a more vigorous contempt for the systems which had put the many into the hands of the few to be butchered or butchers at their will. They could not read Montesquieu without feeling that there was a future in store for them for which the long past had been patiently laboring, and longing, as they read, to hasten its coming. In that future, mankind were to rise higher than they had ever risen before; rulers and ruled were to act in fruitful harmony for their common ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Lumignon," said Stidmann, "you remind me of the publisher before the Revolution who said—'If only I could keep Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau very poor in my backshed, and lock up their breeches in a cupboard, what a lot of nice little books they would write to make my fortune.'—If works of art could be hammered out like nails, workmen would make them.—Give me a thousand ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... inquietude, by endless blotches and erasures. Virgil worked eleven years on the AEneid. The note-books of great men like Hawthorne and Emerson are tell-tales of enormous drudgery, of the years put into a book which may be read in an hour. Montesquieu was twenty-five years writing his "Esprit de Louis," yet you can read it in sixty minutes. Adam Smith spent ten years on his "Wealth of Nations." A rival playwright once laughed at Euripides for spending three days on three lines, when he had written five hundred lines. "But your five ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... all taught that Slavery is a divine institution. During all the centuries from Ignatius to Bossuet, what eminent Christian ever denounced Slavery as wicked? Even the Christian jurisprudists of the eighteenth century defended negro slavery, which it was reserved for the sceptical Montesquieu and the arch-heretic Voltaire to condemn. Montesquieu's ironical chapter on the subject is worthy of Molliere, and Voltaire's is an honor to humanity. He called Slavery "the degrada of the species"; and, in answer to Puffendorff, who claimed that slavery had been established by the free ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... the mind as well as of the senses, criticising everything, analyzing everything, believing nothing. Voltaire was in the midst of it, hating, with all his vehement soul, the abuses that swarmed about him, and assailing them with the inexhaustible shafts of his restless and piercing intellect. Montesquieu was showing to a despot-ridden age the principles of political freedom. Diderot and D'Alembert were beginning their revolutionary Encyclopaedia. Rousseau was sounding the first notes of his mad eloquence,—the wild revolt of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Lazzaroni capable of being organized by wealth in opposition to the higher order of workmen and the middle class. In Harrington's "Oceana," there is much nonsense, but it rises at least to the level of Montesquieu in tracing the intimate connection of political power, even under elective ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... century was marked by a rising of opinion in favor of freedom. The statesmen of Massachusetts read the great work of Montesquieu on the Spirit of Laws; and in bearing their first very remarkable testimony against slavery, they simply adopted his words, repeated without passion,—for they had no dread of the increase of slavery within their own borders, and never doubted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... it without flinging your farthings in his face? As a contrast, however, to this beggarly benevolence, let us look at the Protestant Charter Schools; to them you have lately granted 41,000l.: thus are they supported, and how are they recruited? Montesquieu observes on the English constitution, that the model may be found in Tacitus, where the historian describes the policy of the Germans, and adds, "This beautiful system was taken from the woods;" so in speaking of the charter ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to realizing its importance in the conflict of European interests when he sought to establish James II on its throne as rival to the monarch of Great Britain and counterpoise to the British sovereignty in the western seas. Montesquieu alone of French writers grasped the importance of Ireland in the international affairs of his time, and he blames the vacillation of Louis, who failed to put forth his strength, to establish James upon ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... deprive a man of his liberty has a tendency to rob his soul of every spring to virtuous actions; and were slaves to become fiends, the wonder could not be great. 'Nothing more assimulates a man to a beast,' says the learned Montesquieu, 'than being among freemen, himself a slave; for slavery clogs the mind, perverts the moral faculty, and reduces the conduct of man to the standard of brutes.' What right have you to expect greater things of these poor mortals? You would not blame a brute for committing ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... (1760), written in the character of a Chinese who had come to study European civilisation. It may be noted that Goldsmith had in the Monthly Review, in mentioning Voltaire's memoirs of French writers, quoted a passage about Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes as follows: "It is written in imitation of the Siamese Letters of Du Freny and of the Turkish Spy; but it is an imitation which shows what the originals should have been. ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... generic strokes,—if we had the means;—such details belonging to the Prussian Antiquary, rather than to the English Historian of Friedrich in our day. A happy Ten Years of time. Perhaps the time for Montesquieu's aphorism, 'Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books!' The Prussian Antiquary, had he once got any image formed to himself of Friedrich, and of Friedrich's History in its human lineaments and organic sequences, will glean many memorabilia in those Years: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... that the key inventions have been made for bringing the unseen world into the field of judgment. They had not been made in the time of Aristotle, and they were not yet important enough to be visible for political theory in the age of Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Thomas Jefferson. In a later chapter I think we shall see that even in the latest theory of human reconstruction, that of the English Guild Socialists, all the deeper premises have been taken over from this older system ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... "the secret laws, as they were called, and which," he said, "were singular anomalies of our system, having grown out of that error in our constitution which confers upon the legislative assemblies the power of declaring war, which, in the theory of government, according to Montesquieu and Rousseau, is strictly an executive act. But, as we have made it legislative, whenever secrecy is necessary for an operation of the executive involving the question of peace and war, Congress must pass a secret law to give the President power. Now, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... the thought of the age, external to Great Britain, any corrective of the impressions which dominated her commercial policy. "Commercial monopoly," wrote Montesquieu, "is the leading principle of colonial intercourse;" and an accomplished West Indian, quoting this phrase about 1790, says: "The principles by which the nations of Europe were influenced were precisely the same: (1) to secure to themselves respectively the most important productions of their ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... pierced the Russian sky at the accession of Catherine II (1762-1796). This "Semiramis of the North," the admirer of Buffon, Montesquieu, Diderot, and, more especially, Voltaire, whose motto, N'en croyez rien, she adopted, endeavored, and for a while not without success, to introduce into her own country the spirit of tolerance which pervaded France. Her ukases were intended for all alike, "without distinction of ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... England to visit David Garrick; but he disliked England very thoroughly and was glad to get back to Paris. The events of his life in so far as there were any, were his relations with people. He knew intimately practically all the great men of his century, except Montesquieu and Voltaire, who were off the stage before his day. [15:19] Holbach's most intimate and life-long friend among the great figures of the century was Diderot, of whom Rousseau said, " la distance de quelques sicles du moment o il a vcu, Diderot paratra un homme prodigieux; on ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... that question is not clearly understood," replied Duane, soothingly, for the heat of Livingston's republicanism had never abated. "I fancy it is something like this: So far no constitution has worked so well as the British. Montesquieu knew whereof he praised. The number of men in this country equal to the great problem of self-government are in a pitiful minority. The anarchic conditions of the States, the disgrace which they have brought upon us, their inefficiency ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says:—"The first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent." This is the true ground to assign for the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Governor of the Universe were dethroned, it would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human conscience against a system, the legislation relating to which, in the words of so calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our laws, presents "such unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted." Until the infinite selfishness of the powers that hate and fear the principles of free government swallowed up their convenient virtues, that system was hissed at by all the ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... inhabitants, says Montesquieu, ought to have the right to vote. Under such a rule I suppose my learned opponent would contend that a woman could not be an inhabitant, of course. I feel that I ought to apologize for presenting this point to this extent; it is so obvious, and rests on such broad and ample ground, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and altogether unfitted for the conduct of public affairs, and for the government of men under a despotic rule, whose essential principle is a salutary fear of the prince in all his public officers. Every unlettered native of India is as sensible of this principle [as] Montesquieu was; and will tell us that, in countries like India, a chief, to govern well, must have a smack of the devil ('shaitan') in him; for, if he has not, his public servants will prey upon his innocent and industrious subjects.[5] In India there are no universities or public schools, in which ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... towards England, and in the continental system, which resulted from that hatred. This gigantic system, which oppressed all Europe, could not fail to raise the entire continent against Napoleon and France, and thus to bring on the ruin of both. "Rome," as it is said by Montesquieu, "extended her empire because her wars only followed in succession. Each nation, such was her inconceivable good fortune, waited till another had been conquered, before beginning the attack." Rome fell as soon as all the nations assailed and penetrated ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... notables, who proposed unrestricted suffrage; by the supreme judiciary, who proclaimed the future Constitution; by the clergy and the aristocracy, in the most solemn pledges of the electoral period; by the British example, celebrated by Montesquieu and Voltaire; by the more cogent example of America; by the national classics, who declared, with a hundred tongues, that all authority must be controlled, that the masses must be rescued from degradation, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and joy at discovering in it a reflective side; and for half an hour I remained in a leafy alcove listening to her refined converse,—dealing with books like "Corinne," and "La Chaumiere Indienne,"—La Fontaine, Moliere, Montesquieu,—and especially interesting me in the society which moved around us, which as she touched it with her wand of history and eloquence, acquired an inconceivable interest for me, and I was for the first time proud of being ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... unfeigned modesty of the man who, his every public utterance having been dragged out of him by external compulsion, retains his native shyness and is alone in ignorance of his own influence. "No, no, it is Montesquieu, it is Dohm, it is my dear Lessing. Poor fellow, the Christian bigots are at him now like a plague of stinging insects. I almost wish he hadn't written Nathan der Weise. I am glad to reflect I didn't ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... writer, who, with a just confidence, has prefixed to his own history the honorable epithets of political and philosophical, accuses the timid prudence of Montesquieu, for neglecting to enumerate, among the causes of the decline of the empire, a law of Constantine, by which the exercise of the Pagan worship was absolutely suppressed, and a considerable part of his subjects was left destitute of priests, of temples, and of any public religion. The zeal of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... separately, the geographical view-point which we have found of service to elucidate the development of towns and cities upon its longitudinal [Page: 64] slope. But this is neither more nor less than the method of Montesquieu, whose classic "Esprit des Lois" anticipates and initiates so much of that of later writers—Ritter, Buckle, Taine, or Le Play. Once more then let their common, or rather their resultant, doctrine be stated in terms expressing the latest of these ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of the race from which we are sprung.[8] If we are to account mind not matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... Old Testament. The New Testament. The Koran. The Vedan. Mythology. Montesquieu. The ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... reputation stood far higher than in Britain; several of his works had been translated; he had exchanged letters with Montesquieu and with Helvetius; Rousseau had appealed to him; and the charming Madame de Boufflers had drawn him into a correspondence, marked by almost passionate enthusiasm on her part, and as fair an imitation of enthusiasm as Hume was capable of, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley |
