Top 300 Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “A government which should have no other means of exacting obedience than open war must be very near its ruin, for one of two alternatives would then probably occur:.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

202. “The will of the nation” is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

203. “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.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

204. “The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

205. “No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

206. “When the reality of power has been surrendered, it’s playing a dangerous game to seek to retain the appearance of it; the external aspect of vigor can sometimes support a debilitated body, but most often it manages to deal it the final blow.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

207. “Democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of their country and themselves.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

208. “The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic times.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

209. “The passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

210. “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.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

211. “The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

212. “Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

213. “Nations, as well as man, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

214. “He who in given cases consents to obey his fellows with servility, and who submits his will, and even his thoughts, to their control, how can he pretend that he wishes to be free?”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

215. “European Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately united with the powers of this world. Now that these powers are falling, it is as if it were buried under their ruins.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

216. “In democratic centuries, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual toward the species are much clearer, devotion toward one man becomes rarer: the bond of human affections is extended and loosened.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

217. “If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

218. “Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

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

— Alexis de Tocqueville

220. “Suppose, for instance, that the President of the United States has committed the crime of high treason; the House of Representatives impeaches him, and the Senate degrades him; he must then be tried by a jury, which alone can deprive him of his liberty or his life.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

221. “In America one of the first things done in a new State is to make the post go there; in the forests of Michigan there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild, but that letters and newspapers arrive at least once a week.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

222. “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

223. “A long war almost always places nations in the wretched alternative of being abandoned to ruin by defeat or to despotism by success.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

224. “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

225. “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.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

226. “In the States of New England, from the first, the condition of the poor was provided for;.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

227. “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

228. “In the United States, there is no end which human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united in a society.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

229. “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

230. “No African has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the New World; whence it must be inferred, that all the blacks who are now to be found in that hemisphere are either slaves or freedmen.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

231. “The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

232. “Egotism fears its own self.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

233. “The land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

234. “People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name “socialism” are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

235. “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

236. “America is great because she is good.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

237. “Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

238. “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

239. “Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

240. “There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult – to begin a war and to end it.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

241. “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

242. “I do not find fault with equality for drawing men into the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, but for absorbing them entirely in the search for the pleasures that are permitted.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

243. “The aspect of American society is animated, because men and things are always changing; but it is monotonous, because all the changes are alike.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

244. “It is impossible to read this opening paragraph without an involuntary feeling of religious awe; it breathed the very savor of Gospel antiquity. The sincerity of the author heightens his power of language.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

245. “The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

246. “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

247. “In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

248. “Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

249. “In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

250. “There is hardly a congressman prepared to go home until he has at least one speech printed and sent to his constituents, and he won’t let anybody interrupt his harangue until he has made all his useful suggestions about the 24 states of the Union, and especially the district he represents.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville