Montesquieu Quotes

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

You cannot make men good by law.

You can't legislate morality.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

There is a difference … between the demise of morality laws and the demise of morality

Laws are often made to express collective ethical principles, to establish a climate of opinion …

All effective actions require the passport of morality.

moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

There are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law.

Not everything that is legal is reputable.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

Liberty is equally desirable to the good and to the bad, to the brave and to the dastardly.

Virtue and decency are so nearly related that it is difficult to separate them from each other but in our imagination.

Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.

The very essence of our civilization is that we give a paramount place to morality in all our affairs, public or private.

I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.