Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Secondat

“Happy the people whose annals are tiresome” is a deceptively chilly compliment. Montesquieu, the Enlightenment aristocrat who made a career out of diagnosing how power curdles, isn’t praising boredom for its own sake; he’s praising the conditions that make boredom possible. A “tiresome” national history is one without spectacular ruptures: no coups, no purges, no heroic last stands to be mythologized into propaganda. The line needles our appetite for drama by implying that what we call “greatness” in statecraft is often just catastrophe with good branding.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a civic benediction: may your public life be so orderly that chroniclers have nothing to write. Underneath, it’s an indictment of political culture that confuses turbulence with vitality. If your annals are thrilling, someone is probably suffering. “Interesting times” are rarely experienced as entertainment by the people living through them.

Context matters: Montesquieu is writing in a Europe of dynastic wars, court intrigue, and brittle absolutisms, just decades before revolutions would turn history into a blood sport. His larger project (most famously in The Spirit of the Laws) treats liberty as a design problem: institutions, norms, and checks that restrain ambition and prevent sudden violence. The line works because it flips the prestige economy of nations. It suggests the highest achievement of politics isn’t glory, but maintenance: a stable enough society that history becomes administration, not trauma.