QUOTES by Alexis de Tocqueville
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“In examining the division of powers, as established by the Federal Constitution, remarking on the one hand the portion of sovereignty which has been reserved to the several States, and on the other, the share of power which has been given to the Union, it is evident that the Federal legislators entertained very clear and accurate notions respecting the centralization of government. The United States form not only a republic, but a confederation; yet the national authority is more centralized there than it was in several of the absolute monarchies of Europe....”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“In reality it is far less prejudicial to witness the immorality of the great than to witness that immorality which leads to greatness.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“They will not struggle energetically against him, sometimes they will even applaud him; but they do not follow him. To his vehemence they secretly oppose their inertia, to his revolutionary tendencies their conservative interests, their homely tastes to his adventurous passions, their good sense to the flights of his genius, to his poetry their prose. With immense exertion he raises them for an instant, but they speedily escape from him and fall back, as it were, by their own weight. He strains himself to rouse the indifferent and distracted multitude and finds at last that he is reduced to impotence, not because he is conquered, but because he is alone.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“patriotism and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of a body politic to one end.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“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.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“They took over from the old order not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“men who so uneasily tolerate superiors patiently suffer a master, and show themselves proud and servile at the same time.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“You may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you brought them there; and they will never reproach you for having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“It was not man who implanted in himself what is infinite and the love of what is immortal: those lofty instincts are not the offspring of his capricious will; their steadfast foundation is fixed in human nature, and they exist in spite of his efforts. He may cross and distort them – destroy them he cannot. The soul wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“What is called family pride is often founded on the illusion of self-love. A man wishes to perpetuate and immortalize himself.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Shall I think that the Creator has made man so as to leave him to debate endlessly in the intellectual miseries that surround us? I cannot believe this: God prepares a firmer and calmer future for European societies; I am ignorant of his designs, but I will not cease to believe in them [merely] because I cannot penetrate them, and I would rather doubt my enlightenment than his justice.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“[Patriotism] is in itself a kind of religion: it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and sentiment.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“I am unacquainted with His designs, but I shall not cease to believe in them because I cannot fathom them, and I had rather mistrust my own capacity than His justice”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not. Thus in order that there be society, and all the more, that this society prosper, it is necessary that all the minds of the citizens always be brought together and held together by some principle ideas”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“The more alike men are, the weaker each feels in the face of all.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Montaigne said long ago: "Were I not to follow the straight road for its straightness, I should follow it for having found by experience that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most useful track." The doctrine of interest rightly understood is not then new, but among the Americans of our time it finds universal acceptance; it has become popular there; you may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? ”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“From the time when the exercise of the intellect became a source of strength and of wealth, we see that every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea became a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the graces of the mind, the fire of imagination, depth of thought, and all the gifts which Heaven scatters at a venture turned to the advantage of democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into bold relief the natural greatness of man. Its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal open to all, where the poor and the weak daily resorted for arms.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“On close inspection, we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“[N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“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.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“As I see it, only God can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power. Thus there is no authority on earth so inherently worthy of respect, or invested with a right so sacred, that I would want to let it act without oversight or rule without impediment (p. 290).”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville
“The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”
Quote by -Alexis de Tocqueville