Montesquieu Quotes

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.

It is the life of democracy to favor equality.

Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

Every Man A King

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage…

Here, no privileged orders – no factitious distinctions in society – no hereditary nobility – no royal prerogatives exist, to interpose barriers between the people, and to create distinct classifications in society. All men being considered as enjoying an equality of rights, the propriety and necessity of dispensing, without distinction, the blessings of education ….

Signs everywhere now show a great moral awakening—the cleaning out of rotten business & still more rotten policies. But we’ve only begun! For the first time, men were questioning the fundamentals of democracy, inquiring whether we truly had self-government in America, or whether it had been corrupted by selfish interests. This questioning came not alone from what one might call the working class, but from middle America as well.

Following World War II, the world mostly shared values about human rights, democracy and so forth. Many believed then that Western liberal ideas would be universal. But today it is not the case that we share the same values. If you look at Russia, China, Turkey—and even inside our societies—people have different concepts about how to organize big societies. Typically in Western society, the individual is protected against the collective. But increasingly, the collective is protected against the individual. And even inside our own society, the question arises more and more about how much should you defend the collective against the individual? What is the right balance?

Political corruption is eating our democracy out from the inside. Most Americans know that. But democratic and economic health can't be easily disentangled.

The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.

We are teaching the world the great truth that Governments do better without Kings & Nobles than with them.

Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today.

The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.

We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.

That's a question best put to Bernie Sanders himself, but I think that he will probably put forward ideas that are related to the corrupting role of Citizens United and Buckley versus Valeo court decisions and the need to restore a by-and-for-the-people republic envisioned in our Constitution instead of the of-, by- and for-the-most-powerful system that we have right now.

If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.

Our government is built upon the vote. But votes that are purchasable are quicksands, and a government built on them stands upon corruption and revolution.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

In the many forms of government which have sprung up there has always been an acknowledgement of justice and proportionate equality, although mankind fail in attaining them, as indeed I have already explained. Democracy, for example, arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

The democrats think that as they are equal they ought to be equal in all things.

Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.

As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them.