Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Secondat

A neat little sentence that sounds polite until you notice the knife hidden in the cuff. Montesquieu isn’t praising “power” as a noble force; he’s treating it as a permanent hazard. The verb choice, “ought,” is doing real work here: it’s moral language aimed at a political reality. People with authority will not reliably restrain themselves, so the system must be built to assume appetite, vanity, and self-protection. He’s not asking rulers to be virtuous; he’s engineering around their predictability.

The subtext is almost clinical: power is less a tool than a tendency. Left alone, it expands, consolidates, and rewrites the rules to justify itself. So the only durable restraint is counterpressure - not sermons, not goodwill, not a better class of leader, but another institution with enough leverage to say no. “Serve” is the key irony: power’s proper job is to limit power. That inversion is the entire modern liberal state in miniature.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of French absolutism and admiring (with skepticism) the British constitutional model, Montesquieu helps popularize the logic behind separation of powers. His insight is less “balance is nice” than “unchecked authority is a design flaw.” It anticipates everything from independent courts to bicameral legislatures to federalism - and it also explains why those mechanisms are always under siege. If power’s nature is to accumulate, then “checks and balances” aren’t a one-time invention; they’re a recurring maintenance fight.