Top 300 Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach...”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

102. “Grant me thirty years of equal division of inheritances and a free press, and I will provide you with a republic.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

103. “I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

104. “To get the inestimable good that freedom of the press assures one must know how to submit to the inevitable evil it gives rise to.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

105. “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

106. “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

107. “The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

108. “Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

109. “The progress of democracy seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

110. “Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

111. “Under wage labor, the art advances, the artisan declines.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

112. “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

113. “A newspaper is an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes of his own accord, and talks to you briefly every day of the common wealth, without distracting you from your private affairs.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

114. “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

115. “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.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

116. “So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

117. “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.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

118. “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.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

119. “There is no philosopher in the world so great but he believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

120. “The arrogance of wealth and the dejection of wretchedness, capital cities of unwonted extent, a lax morality, a vulgar egotism, and a great confusion of interests, are the dangers which almost invariably arise from the magnitude of States.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

121. “In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

122. “A whole nation cannot rise above itself.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

123. “The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

124. “I have heard of patriotism in the United States, and it is a virtue which may be found among the people, but never among the leaders of the people.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

125. “Absolute excellence is rarely to be found in any legislation.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

126. “The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

127. “I had rather mistrust my own capacity than God’s justice.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

128. “Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

129. “A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

130. “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

131. “A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

132. “The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

133. “Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

134. “Comfort becomes a goal when distinctions of rank are abolished and privileges destroyed.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

135. “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

136. “To mimic virtue is of every age; but the hypocrisy of luxury belongs more particularly to the ages of democracy.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

137. “The only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

138. “The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

139. “Life is to be entered upon with courage.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

140. “To remain silent is the most useful service that a mediocre speaker can render to the public good.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

141. “How could a society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened, and what can be done with a people master of itself if it not subject to God?”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

142. “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

143. “Those which we call necessary institutions are simply no more than institutions to which we have become accustomed.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

144. “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

145. “Nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal property is augmented and distributed among them, and as the number of those possessing it is increased.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

146. “Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

147. “One of the commonest weaknesses of human intelligence is the wish to reconcile opposing principles and to purchase harmony at the expense of logic.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

148. “Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

149. “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

150. “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