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Support the one who commands, just as, to be sheltered from the injuries of the air, the covering must be sound.
A constitution to be made is a building to be raised. Think of the keystone of the vault. Let it be so solid that nothing around it can be lowered, and that it itself can never sink or rise.
A people always restless is a people always building. This people lodges beneath a canopy whose poles it must perpetually hold with both hands. It has only a tent, not solid walls and a vault. It is encamped, not established.
... And to govern like heaven, without men meddling in it.
There are passions of the soul that laws must satisfy: the amor habendi, through property; ambition, through paternal power; vanity or the love of brilliance, through the ceremonies of politeness, etc. These passions must be kept within their bounds, first by moderation in desires; second by a perpetual exercise of inward power; third by the vanity of being oneself esteemed polite.
The leisure to think of heaven. Where there is no kind of theocracy, there is neither virtue nor happiness.
Its affairs go well, but its tranquility goes badly. I see there only a people that believes no price can be too high to pay for its riches. Take away its commerce tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow it will find its political anxieties unbearable. It will no longer wish to endure them. A wholly peaceful life would make its constitution odious to it.
French monarchy. So long as the great and the people loved it... But once all had grown disgusted with it, its preserving principle, the affection felt for it, the pleasure received from it, its soul departed from it, and its entire body dissolved: it rotted.
There are periods of excellence, and of an excellence alike in every kind of government. But some are more durable than others, and those must be preferred. It is thus that the most deplorable constitutions have moments of youth that make them equal to the most robust, but not all are equally fitted to grow old with their strength.
The English and their government. They should not be proud of it, but I would not wish to make them ashamed of it.
The homage paid to gold by philosophy. Her esteem for riches, her care to exalt lucrative professions. Money seemed to her a dignity. It was solely for this reason that she ranked among the most honorable talents the skill of bringing it from afar by certain regular routes and, what am I saying? the function of moving it about. A banker, a cashier, a receiver of public revenues seemed to her kinds of magistrates... A kind of priesthood. Plutus was their divinity.
Montesquieu. All his works are only considerations.
The chronically ailing do not, like other men, have an old age that overwhelms their minds through the sudden ruin of all their strength. They keep to the end the same languors, but also the same fire and the same vivacity; accustomed as they are to doing without a body... Most of them keep to the end a sound mind in a sick body. Time harms only the length of their lives, and changes them little.