Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.

What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.

In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.

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

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.

Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach.

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.

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

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

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.

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.

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say 'Gentlemen' to the person with whom he is conversing.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government...is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.

Physical strength therefore is one of the first conditions of happiness and even of the existence of nations.

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.

The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.

A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.