Alexis De Tocqueville Quotes

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Literature became an arsenal where the poorest and the weakest could always find weapons to their hand. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who becomes possessed of riches and power in a few years; this spectacle excites their surprise and envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday very equal is today their ruler. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant; for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous and less talented than he was. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I questioned the faithful of all communions; I particularly sought the society of clergymen, who are the depositories of the various creeds and have a personal interest in their survival ... all thought the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest….

Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare charges for a man's life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasure, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?

Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepare ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.

All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. The American struggles against the obstacles which nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained with the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy ... liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The Americans live in a democratic state of society, which has naturally suggested to them certain laws and a certain political character. This ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The province of Texas is still part of the Mexican dominions, but it will soon contain no Mexicans; the same thing has occurred whenever the Anglo-Americans have come into contact with populations of a different origin. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Burke had little notion of the conditions in which the monarchy he mourned had left us to face our new masters.
The administration of the Ancien Régime had deprived the French in advance of both the ability and the desire to help one another. When the Revolution came, one would have searched in vain in most of France for ten men accustomed to acting together in a disciplined way and defending themselves. The central government alone was supposed to
take charge of defending them all, so that when the royal administration lost control of that central government to a sovereign and unaccountable assembly, and this once complacent body turned terrifying, nothing could stop it or even slow it for a moment. The same cause that had brought the monarchy down so easily made everything possible after its fall. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.

A principle of authority must then always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has. The independence of individual minds may be greater, or it may be less: unbounded it cannot be. Thus the question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in the ages of democracy, but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

You need not value it yourself if you do not wish to; but you ought to allow it to us who do value it. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of the nation; manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Democracy encourages a taste for physical gratification; this taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is matter only; and materialism, in its turn, hurries them on with mad impatience to these same delights; such is the fatal circle within which democratic nations are driven round. It were well that they should see the danger and hold back. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The Americans of the United States stand in precisely the same position with regard to the peoples of South America as their fathers, the English, occupy with regard to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and all those nations of Europe which receive their articles of daily consumption from England, because they are less advanced in civilization and trade. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

While he loved liberty, he detested the crimes that had been committed in its name. Jon J. Ingalls ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves they will seek it, cherish it, and view any deprivation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults. ~ 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 ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Muhammad professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Some historical revisionists have also attempted to diminish the role of God and religion in our nation's past. A careful examination of the records, however, makes it quite clear that religion was a very important factor in the development of our nation. In 1831 when Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to try to unravel the secrets to the success of a fledgling nation that was already competing with the powers of Europe on virtually every level, he discovered that we had a fantastic public educational system that rendered anyone who had finished the second grade completely literate. He was more astonished to discover that the Bible was an important tool used to teach moral principles in our public schools. No particular religious denomination was revered, but rather commonly accepted biblical truths became the backbone of our social structure. ~ Ben Carson

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words. ~ 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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The position of the Americans is quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. ~ 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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville ~ George F. Will

If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism. ~ 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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

But in America the sovereignty of the people is neither hidden nor sterile as with some other nations; mores recognize it, and the laws proclaim it; it spreads with freedom and attains unimpeded its ultimate consequences. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The invention of fire-arms equalized the villein and the noble on the field of battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death. ~ 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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Centralization and socialism are products of the same soil. The one is to the other what the cultivated fruit is to the wild stock. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the State until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

When a legislator succeeds, after persevering efforts, in exercising an indirect influence upon the destiny of nations, his genius is lauded by mankind, whilst, in point of fact, the geographical position of the country which he is unable to change, a social condition which arose without his co-operation, manners and opinions which he cannot trace to their source, and an origin with which he is unacquainted, exercise so irresistible an influence over the courses of society that he is himself borne away by the current, after an ineffectual resistance. Like the navigator, he may direct the vessel which bears him along, but he can neither change its structure, nor raise the winds, nor lull the waters which swell beneath him. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune, because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The taste for luxury, the love of war, the sway of fashion, and the most superficial as well as the deepest passions of the human heart, co-operated ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government ... is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States ... capable of maintaining the rule of democracy ... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores ... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances ... to advantage ... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American ~ Naomi Wolf

America is a country where they have freedom of speech but everyone says the same thing. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The American republics have no standing armies to intimidate a discontented minority; but as no minority has as yet been reduced to declare open war, the necessity of an army has not been felt. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The two chief weapons which parties use in order to ensure success are the public press and the formation of associations. ~ 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

One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States that have abolished slaves than in the States where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern State ... ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French political philosopher and sociologist, in his classic Democracy in America, written after a lengthy visit in the 1830s, saw equality, not majority rule, as the outstanding characteristic of America. "In America," he wrote, the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled, that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs. The ~ Milton Friedman

Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man. ~ 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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I shall not fear to say that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me of all the philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee against themselves that remains to them. The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Socialism is a new form of slavery. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the commonest weaknesses of human intelligence is the wish to reconcile opposing principles and to purchase harmony at the expensive of logic. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Men living in democratic times have many passions, but most of their passions either end in the love of riches, or proceed from it. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Remember that life is neither pain nor pleasure; it is serious business, to be entered upon with courage and in a spirit of self-sacrifice. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Is natural that they should hasten to invoke the assistance of religion, for they must know that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith; but they have seen religion in the ranks of their adversaries, and they inquire no further; some of them attack it openly, and the remainder are afraid to defend it. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Sixty years is too brief a compass for man's imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

To build enormous palaces, to conquer or to mimic nature, to ransack the world in order to gratify the passions of a man, is not thought of, but to add a few yards of land to your field, to plant an orchard, or enlarge a dwelling, to always be making life more comfortable and convenient, to avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest wants without effort and almost without cost. These are small objects, but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till they at last shut out the rest of the world and sometimes intervene between itself and heaven. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I know without needing to hear the voice of the Creator that the stars trace out in space the orbits which His hand has drawn. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

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. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

One's love for despotism is in exact proportion to one's contempt for one's country. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

It is the civil jury that really saved the liberties of England. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

But in the course of thirty years a great change took place, and the North refused to perpetuate what had become the "peculiar institution" of the South, especially as it gave the South a species of aristocratic preponderance. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Religion in America ... Must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions for that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it ... I do know know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion - for who can search the human heart? - But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The more alike men are, the weaker each feels in the face of all. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A man is born; his first years go by in obscurity amid the pleasures or hardships of childhood. He grows up; then comes the beginning of manhood; finally society's gates open to welcome him; he comes into contact with his fellows. For the first time he is scrutinized and the seeds of the vices and virtues of his maturity are thought to be observed forming in him.
This is, if I am not mistaken, a singular error.
Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first word which arouse with him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

And now, As I come near the end of this book in which I have recorded so many considerable achievements of the Americans, if I am asked how we should account for the unusual prosperity and growing strength of this nation, I would reply that they must be attributed to the superiority of their woman. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

This so-called tolerance, which, in my opinion, is nothing but a huge indifference. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Religion regards civil liberty as a noble exercise of man's faculties, the world of politics being a sphere intended by the Creator for the free play of intelligence. Religion, being free and powerful within its own sphere and content with the position reserved for it, realized that its sway is all the better established because it relies only on its own powers and rules men's hearts without external support.
Freedom sees religion as the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its rights. Religion is considered as the guardian of mores, and mores are regarded as the guarantee of the laws and pledge for the maintenance of freedom itself. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The States in which the citizens have enjoyed their rights longest are those in which they make the best use of them. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville