Montesquieu Quotes

Happy the people whose annals are vacant.

Blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.

Without history one remains always a child.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.

Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History Books!

Without the library, you have no civilization.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

A lot of people believe that you don't need to know the history and that creates newness. I disagree: we should always be informed and then destroy it.

History is a record of exploded ideas.

The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.

History repeats, but science reverberates.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History .

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.

Ultimately there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error.

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.

I think when hip hop first started, people were open to it, and groups like Public Enemy and there was groups like Poor Righteous Teachers and all these people who were spitting a lot of knowledge, a lot of history, questioning a lot of societal barriers was starting to be super popular.

For life is a fire burning along a piece of string--or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?--and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away.

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

The history of empires is the record of human misery; the history of the sciences is that of the greatness and happiness of mankind.

Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing.

Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called to fill in the gaps that science did not understand.