Montesquieu Quotes

Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough.

Reformers on the left and right alike must give up the fantasy that humans are blank slates who can be overwritten with ideal values, however discomfiting or disappointing the realization may be.

Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries.

Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.

Knowledge of mankind is a knowledge of their passions.

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.

Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.

As fast as I can tell there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning year after year...One is fear. The other is desire.

The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.

All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

Did people ever stop changing? They surprised you with fresh pain. Sometimes they surprised you with happiness, but the pain was the sharper surprise. There was no way to protect yourself from it. People could always change and always hurt you. Of course it went in the other direction too, you could hurt them when you didn't intend it and that too was out of your control.

In order to judge of the inside of others, study your own; for men in general are very much alike; and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same; and whatever engages or disgusts, pleases or offends you, in others, will, mutatis mutandis, engage, disgust, please, or offend others, in you.

The saddest illusion of the revolutionary is that revolution itself will transform the nature of human beings.

True love can alter human lives and change human nature.

History is rarely made by reasonable men.

Sex and Love are two words that anyone can relate to, no matter the nationality or age.

Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character, and passions, his mistakes, and weaknesses."--Democritus An Abundance of Katherines---John Green

Perhaps love makes us grow old before our time and makes us young again when youth has passed.

Lust sullies every age of man, but quite extinguishes old age.

A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an' remains at large.