Quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville

In no country in the world does the law hold so absolute a language as in America, and in no country is the right of applying it vested in so many hands.

By the choice of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue.

The weak generally mistrust the justice and the reason of the strong.

The old nobility was the most irreligious class of society before 1789, and the most pious after 1793 ...

La democrazia è il potere di un popolo informato.

In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; the one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other inclined to prohibit him from thinking at all.

Il n'y a rien de si difficile à distinguer que les nuances qui séparent un malheur immérité d'une infortune que le vice a produite. Combien de misères sont à la fois le résultat de ces deux causes!

In aristocracies the master often exercises, even without being aware of it, an amazing sway over the opinions, the habits, and the manners of those who obey him, and his influence extends even further than his authority.

It appears to me beyond doubt that sooner or later we shall arrive, like the Americans, at an almost complete equality of conditions.

The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be looked upon as correlative institutions; just as the censorship of the press and universal suffrage are two things which are irreconcilably opposed, and which cannot long be retained among the institutions of the same people.

he often takes an interest in their lot by a last stretch of egotism.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it.

There is nothing more prodigal of wonders than the art of being free ... but nothing is harder than the apprenticeship of liberty.

In the main we deal in this life, he says, chiefly with probabilities, with difficult choices often having to do with lesser evils, with situations where one must weigh the pros and cons and often act without anything approaching certainty, but act one must, for it is better even to make a mistake than to hobble oneself permanently in indecision.

In America there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper

There is a sort of American who, instead of going to dance joyously in the public square in his leisure moments, as people of his profession continue to do in a great part of Europe, goes off alone to the depth of his home to drink. This man enjoys two pleasures at once: he dreams of his trade and gets drunk decently within the family home.

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;

To meddle in the government of society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure that an American knows.

The inhabitant of New England is attached to his township not so much because he was born there as because he sees in that township a free and strong corporation that he is a part of and that is worth his trouble to seek to direct.

A proposition must be plain to be adopted by the understanding of a people. A false notion which is clear and precise will always meet with a greater number of adherents in the world than a true principle which is obscure or involved.

Among all beings, man alone shows a natural distaste for existence and an immense desire to exist: he scorns life and fears nothingness. These different instincts constantly push his soul toward the contemplation of another world, and it is religion that leads him there. So religion is only a particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human heart as hope itself.u

Democracy shuts the past against the poet, but opens the future before him.

Pour ma part, je ne saurais concevoir qu'une nation puisse vivre ni surtout prospérer sans une forte centralisation gouvernementale. Mais je pense que la centralisation administrative n'est propre qu'à énerver les peuples qui s'y soumettent, parce qu'elle tend sans cesse à diminuer parmi eux l'esprit de cité.

Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. . . . How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie be not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? and what can be done with a people which is its own master, if it be not submissive to the Divinity?