Alexis De Tocqueville Quotes
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order.
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support
Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery.
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.
We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.
The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.
When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.
Those which we call necessary institutions are simply no more than institutions to which we have become accustomed.
The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.
If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure
One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government...is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.
There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
Grant me thirty years of equal division of inheritances and a free press, and I will provide you with a republic.
America is a country where they have freedom of speech but everyone says the same thing.
Righteous women in their circle of influence, beginning in the home, can turn the world around.
Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves.
A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism.
