The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests.
Interpretation
Nations should strive to do good for one another during peace and minimize harm during conflict, while safeguarding their own interests.
This quote by Montesquieu highlights the moral obligation of nations to promote goodwill and cooperation in times of peace. It also emphasizes the need for nations to act judiciously during conflicts, ensuring that while they look after their own interests, they should aim to inflict the least damage possible on others, thereby balancing self-interest with ethical considerations in international relations.
In practice
In a speech about international diplomacy, a leader might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of cooperation.
When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come.
Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.
Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.
Illegal immigrants in considerable numbers have become productive members of our society and are a basic part of our work force. Those who have established equities in the United States should be recognized and accorded legal status. At the same time, in so doing, we must not encourage illegal immigration.
I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.
Money is the probably the most successful story ever told. It has no objective value... but then you have these master storytellers: the big bankers, the finance ministers... and they come, and they tell a very convincing story.
I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented.
It doesn't matter if you please the whole world and don't please Jesus. But if you please Jesus, it doesn't matter whom you displease.
It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
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