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Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.

— Montesquieu

La Société est l'union des hommes, et non pas les hommes.

Original text (French)

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Society

More quotes by Montesquieu

People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

Lettres Persanes (1721)

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

The Spirit of the Laws (1748)

One must give one power a ballast, so to speak, to put it in a position to resist another.

The Spirit of the Laws (1748)

Constant experience shows us that every man who has power is inclined to abuse it; he goes until he finds limits.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Montesquieu (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.