Alexis de Tocqueville quotes - page 2

An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
The man who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. "Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
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. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
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. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville