Men do not receive truth from their enemies, and their friends scarcely offer it to them; that is why I have spoken it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, Viscount de Tocqueville (29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859) was a French diplomat, political scientist, and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution.
I thought that many would take it upon themselves to announce the new benefits that equality promises to men, but that few would dare to point out from afar the perils with which it threatens them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Each person therefore shuts himself up tightly within himself, and from there presumes to judge the world.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the midst of the continual movement that reigns within a democratic society, the link that unites generations is loosened or broken [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
For a society to exist, [...] it is necessary that all the minds of the citizens be always gathered and held together by some principal ideas.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no philosopher in the world so great that he does not believe a million things on the faith of others, and who does not suppose many more truths than he establishes.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As citizens become more equal and alike, [...] the disposition to believe the mass increases, and it is more and more opinion that leads the world.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The public [...] does not persuade its beliefs, it imposes them and makes them penetrate souls by a sort of immense pressure of the mind of all on the intelligence of each.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality [...] delivers [each citizen] isolated and defenseless to the action of the greatest number.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
For my part, when I feel the hand of power weighing on my brow, I care little to know who oppresses me, and I am no more disposed to put my head in the yoke because a million arms present it to me.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
General ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I am led to think that if [man] has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When religion is destroyed in a people, [...] such a state [...] slackens the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Most of those who live in times of equality are full of an ambition that is at once keen and soft; they want to achieve great success immediately, but they would like to be spared great efforts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Aristocratic nations are naturally inclined to restrict the limits of human perfectibility too much, and democratic nations sometimes extend them beyond measure.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The social ill may be less than one supposes; but no one can deny that it is very great and that there is a pressing need to apply a remedy to it.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To judge a new system with full knowledge of the facts, it is necessary for the entire generation of those who were condemned [...] under the previous one to have disappeared.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The truth is that any considerable change [...] is a difficult operation which brings with it, whatever one does, some uncertainties. This is a necessary, but not irremediable, evil.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Such a reform can only be done gradually: if the change is gradual [...], the experience gained [...] will teach what needs to be added or removed.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It would seem we apply the harshest regime to the least guilty, and reserve the mildest for the most criminal: which is [...] contrary to all principles of natural equity.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Everything is connected [...] in the prison system. [...] Reason and public interest indicate that when one mode of imprisonment is made more severe, the severity must be felt at once on all levels of the penal scale.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The guiding principle of criminal law is that the legislator should only leave to the judgment of the courts what it is impossible for them to decide themselves.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The mode of imprisonment and the duration of imprisonment are two correlative ideas that cannot be separated. [...] To modify the regime without touching the duration is to wish for the penal law to be either cruel or powerless.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The right of pardon, [...], in a well-ordered society, cannot be used as a routine means of administering prisons.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To flatter oneself that one can completely succeed in making [inequalities] disappear is to believe oneself stronger than the very necessity of things.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is better to fail in logic than to risk failing in humanity.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[Imprisonment] is [...] a matter of education more than punishment and example; it is a precautionary measure rather than a penalty; and here we must consider the government less as a guardian than as a tutor.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Public morality and the general interest require that equal punishments be applied to similar offenses, and this uniformity of repression can only be achieved by entrusting the direction of all prisons to the central power.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The penitentiary system can only produce the happy effects that we are entitled to expect from it if the administration [...] succeeds in arousing the interest of the populations outside of itself, in securing the free cooperation of a certain number of citizens.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
What is at issue here is the morality of the country and the security of its citizens.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
There have been more wicked revolutionaries than those of 1848, but I do not think there have ever been any more foolish; they knew neither how to make use of universal suffrage, nor how to do without it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[They seemed] to have taken on the task of solving this insoluble problem: namely, to govern by the majority, but against the majority's taste.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
By establishing universal suffrage, they thought they were calling the people to the aid of the revolution; they only gave them arms against it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[...] to commit acts of violent iniquity, it is not enough for a government to want to do so [...]; the morals, ideas, and passions of the time must also lend themselves to it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I saw society cut in two: those who possessed nothing, united in a common greed; those who possessed something, in a common anguish.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
A somber despair had taken hold of this oppressed and threatened bourgeoisie, and this despair was imperceptibly turning into courage.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I had always believed that one could not hope to settle the revolutionary movement gradually and peacefully [...] and that it would only be stopped suddenly by a great battle.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The history of assemblies [...] constantly sees one party exaggerate its feelings to embarrass its opponent, and the latter feign feelings it does not have to avoid the trap.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[They] felt isolated and suspect; they inspired fear and they were afraid, two opposites that often meet in politics.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
We console ourselves for not knowing foreign countries by thinking we at least know our own, and we are wrong, for within it there are always regions we have not visited [...].
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The revolution [...], by striking the upper classes, had cured them of irreligion; it had made them grasp, if not the truth, at least the social utility of belief.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have always thought that, whatever the method of a general election, most of the rare individuals a nation possesses ultimately get elected.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The Constituent Assembly had been elected to face civil war: that was its main merit; as long as it had to fight, it was great; it only became wretched after the victory [...].
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
To conquer demagogy through democracy, such was my sole aim.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have a natural inclination for adventures, and a little hint of danger has always seemed to me the best seasoning one can give to most of life's actions.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
What attaches the human heart most keenly is not the peaceful possession of a precious object, but the imperfectly satisfied desire to possess it and the incessant fear of losing it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocratic societies, the rich [...] do not fear changing their state [...]. Material well-being is therefore not for them the goal of life; it is a way of living.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Even amidst material pleasures, the members of an aristocracy often show a proud contempt for these same pleasures.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All revolutions [...] have shown with what ease people accustomed to the superfluous could do without the necessary, while men who have laboriously reached affluence can barely live after losing it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In nations where the aristocracy dominates [...], the people eventually become accustomed to poverty as the rich do to their opulence.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In these kinds of societies, the imagination of the poor is cast towards the other world; the miseries of real life constrain it, but it escapes them and seeks its pleasures elsewhere.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When [...] ranks are blended and privileges destroyed, [...] the desire to acquire well-being presents itself to the imagination of the poor, and the fear of losing it to the mind of the rich.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A multitude of mediocre fortunes is established. Those who possess them have enough material pleasures to conceive the taste for them, but not enough to be content with them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They therefore constantly strive to pursue or to hold on to these pleasures that are so precious, so incomplete, and so fugitive.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The passion for material well-being is essentially a middle-class passion; it grows and spreads with this class; it becomes predominant with it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I have not met, in America, a citizen so poor that he did not cast a look of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Most of these rich men were poor; they have felt the sting of need [...], and now that the victory is won, the passions that accompanied the struggle survive it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The love of well-being has become the national and dominant taste; the great current of human passions flows in this direction, carrying everything along in its course.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When the revolution that has changed the social and political state of a people [...] begins to emerge in literature, it is generally through the theater that it first appears.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The spectator of a dramatic work is, in a way, caught off guard by the impression suggested to him. He does not have time to question his memory [...]; he yields to it before knowing it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If you want to judge in advance the literature of a people turning toward democracy, study its theater.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no literary enjoyment more within reach of the crowd than that which is experienced at the sight of the stage. No preparation or study is needed to feel it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The tastes and natural instincts of democratic peoples, in terms of literature, will first manifest themselves [...] in the theater, and one can predict that they will be introduced there with violence.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democratic peoples [...] care little about what happened in Rome and Athens; they mean to be spoken to about themselves, and it is the picture of the present that they demand.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A democratic theater does not prove that the nation is a democracy [...], but when the spirit of aristocracy reigns alone in the theater, it demonstrates invincibly that the entire society is aristocratic.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic societies, spectators [...] like to find on stage the confused mixture of conditions, feelings, and ideas that they encounter before their eyes; the theater becomes more striking, more vulgar, and more true.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
By dint of wanting to meticulously reproduce the small peculiarities of the present moment [...], [authors] forget to portray the general features of the species.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The effect of democracy is generally to make literary rules and conventions doubtful; in the theater, it abolishes them entirely, only to substitute the whim of each author and each audience.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, people listen to plays, but they do not read them. Most [...] do not seek the pleasures of the mind, but the vivid emotions of the heart.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One can count on [the public] not to worry about the paths by which you have led it, if you finally bring it before an object that touches it. It will never reproach you for having moved it in defiance of the rules.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Peoples are like individuals. They give themselves over unreservedly to their main passions, and then they take great care not to yield too much to the pull of tastes they do not have.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no portion of literature that is connected by closer and more numerous ties to the current state of society than the theater.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The theater of one era can never be suitable for the next, if, between the two, an important revolution has changed the customs and the laws.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
By political judgment I mean the sentence pronounced by a political body temporarily vested with the right to judge.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In absolute governments, [...] one does not even keep the outward appearances of justice and dishonors one's authority by seeking to strengthen it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The main purpose of political judgment in the United States is [...] to withdraw power from one who makes poor use of it, and to prevent that same citizen from being vested with it in the future.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Political judgment, as it is understood in Europe, [...] violates the conservative principle of the separation of powers, and [...] constantly threatens the liberty and life of men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Political judgment in the United States [...] does not threaten the existence of citizens; it does not hang over all heads, as it does in Europe.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Europeans, in establishing political tribunals, had as their main object to punish the guilty; Americans, to take away their power.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One must not [...] be deceived by the apparent gentleness of American legislation, in what relates to political judgments.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the United States, [political] conviction is less dreadful and more certain.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Nothing is more frightening than the vagueness of American laws when they define political crimes, properly so called.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What makes American laws in this matter so formidable, stems, I dare say, from their very gentleness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To condemn a political enemy to death [...] is a horrible assassination; to declare one's adversary unworthy of possessing that same power [...] can seem the honest outcome of the struggle.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This sentence, so easy to pronounce [...] condemns [those it strikes] to a shameful idleness worse than death.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Political judgment [...] makes the majority entirely the master of those who govern.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not know whether, all things considered, political judgment, as it is understood in the United States, is not the most formidable weapon ever placed in the hands of the majority.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When the American republics begin to degenerate, [...] it will be easy to recognize: one will only have to see if the number of political judgments increases.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One can only study barbarian peoples with weapons in hand.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
What exhausts the country [...] is less the very weight of the burdens that [a conquest] imposes on it, than the uncertainty in which it is kept as to their probable or possible extent.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
It is very difficult, [...] one must admit, to know where to stop in the occupation of a barbarian country.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
There is no material force, however great, that can exempt men from moderation and common sense.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
A new government, and especially a conquering government, can well give material power to its friends, but it cannot communicate to them the moral power and force of opinion that it does not itself possess.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
[...] we have made the [conquered] society much more miserable, more disordered, more ignorant, and more barbaric than it was before it knew us.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
What we owe them at all times is a good government.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
What one can hope for is not to suppress the hostile feelings that a [foreign] government inspires, but to dampen them; not to make [its] yoke loved, but to make it seem more and more bearable.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
It would be unwise to believe that we can bind ourselves to [subject peoples] by a community of ideas and customs, but we can hope to do so through a community of interests.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
Civilized peoples often oppress and drive to despair barbarian peoples by their mere contact, without wishing to, and so to speak, without knowing it.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
If we were to act in such a way as to show that in our eyes the former inhabitants [...] are but an obstacle [...], the question of life and death would arise between the two races. [The country] would become an enclosed field, [...] where one of them would have to die.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
Let us not repeat, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the history of the conquest of America. Let us not imitate the bloody examples that the opinion of mankind has condemned.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
The administration [...] resembles a machine in constant motion, whose cogs all move separately or hold each other in check. With much movement, it makes no progress.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
It is not a matter of giving birth to a new people with its own laws, customs, and separate interests [...], but of implanting [elsewhere] a population in all ways similar to ourselves.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
In administration, foresight can only be the work of one; a complex and confused administration must ask for many funds, and often exceed those granted to it.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
In Europe, everything seems to conspire to increase indefinitely the prerogatives of the central power and to render individual existence weaker, more subordinate, and more precarious each day.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It would seem that every step democratic nations take toward equality brings them closer to despotism.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Everywhere the state is increasingly coming to direct the least of its citizens by itself and to guide each of them alone in the smallest of matters.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Education [...] has become, among most peoples of our time, a national affair. The state receives and often takes the child from its mother's arms to entrust it to its agents.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Not only has the sovereign's power extended [...], it overflows on all sides and spills into the domain hitherto reserved for individual independence.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It would seem that they [the princes] consider themselves responsible for the actions and individual destiny of their subjects, [...] and, if need be, to make them happy in spite of themselves.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Everywhere [the public administration] penetrates further into private affairs than in the past; [...] it establishes itself more each day alongside, around, and above each individual, to assist, advise, and compel them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In a democratic nation, only the state inspires confidence in individuals, because it alone seems to them to have some strength and permanence.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The industrial class has a greater need to be regulated, supervised, and restrained than other classes, and it is natural that the powers of government should grow with it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It would seem [...] that it [the industrial class] brings despotism within itself, and that it extends naturally as it develops.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among democratic peoples, it is only through association that the citizens' resistance to central power can occur.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
These same men who from time to time overthrow a throne and trample kings underfoot, increasingly bend without resistance to the slightest will of a clerk.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Two revolutions seem to be taking place today, in opposite directions; one continually weakens power, and the other continually strengthens it: at no other time in our history has it appeared so weak or so strong.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Men] wanted to be free in order to become equal, and as equality was established more with the help of liberty, it made liberty more difficult for them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not trust, I confess, the spirit of liberty that seems to animate my contemporaries; I see clearly that the nations of our day are turbulent, but I do not clearly discover that they are liberal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Of all punishments, deportation is the only one which, without being cruel, nevertheless frees society from the presence of the guilty.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The system of deportation rests [...] on an idea [...] well-suited by its simplicity to reach the masses, who never have the time to delve deeper.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
One surely cannot believe that a convict returns to his country an honest man, simply because he has been to the antipodes, because he has been made to travel around the world.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Penal colonies do not reform [...] by moralizing the individual sent there. They change him by giving him interests other than those of crime, by creating a future for him; he does not reform if he harbors the idea of return.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The European race has received from heaven or acquired through its efforts such an indisputable superiority over all other races [...] that the man placed among us [...] at the lowest rung of the social ladder, is still the first among the savages.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
A singular punishment, it must be admitted, which the convict fears to escape.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To be honest, for many Englishmen, deportation is little more than an emigration to the Australian lands, undertaken at the expense of the State.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The punishment of deportation intimidates no one, and it emboldens many on the path of crime.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The more the colony grows in population, the less disposed it will be to become the receptacle for the mother country's vices.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The name of the mother country brings back to the deportee's memory only the recollection of sometimes undeserved miseries. It is there that he was unhappy, persecuted, guilty, dishonored.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The vices that we thus remove from Europe are not destroyed, they are merely transplanted to another soil, and England only unburdens itself of a part of its miseries to bequeath them to its children of the Australian lands.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
What is essentially lacking in Australian society is morals. [...] vice there obtained the support of the majority.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
True greatness, in a people as in a man, has always seemed to us to consist in undertaking, not all that one desires, but all that one can.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The world no longer seems vacant to us; all places in it seem to be occupied.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
One would say that the universe is still divided by the imaginary line that the popes had drawn, and that beyond it extend unknown continents where the imagination can go and lose itself in freedom.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I do not hold for the liberty of the press that complete and instantaneous love which one accords to things that are supremely good [...]. I love it out of consideration for the evils it prevents much more than for the good it does.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If someone could show me, between complete independence and the total servitude of thought, an intermediate position where I could hope to stand, I might establish myself there; but who will discover this intermediate position?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Contrary to all material powers, the power of thought often increases by the very small number of those who express it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
You started from the abuses of liberty, and I find you at the feet of a despot.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In certain nations [...] the independence of the press must no longer be considered as one of the guarantees, but as the only remaining guarantee of the liberty and security of the citizens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press are [...] two entirely correlative things.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The press is] that extraordinary power, so strangely mixed with good and evil, that without it liberty could not live, and with it order can scarcely be maintained.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In matters of the press, there is therefore really no middle ground between servitude and license.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To reap the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, one must know how to submit to the unavoidable evils it gives rise to.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the only way to neutralize the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The governments of Europe seem to me to act towards the press in the same way that knights of old acted towards their adversaries: they want to provide for their enemy, so that [...] they may have more glory in resisting him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the United States, each newspaper individually has little power; but the periodical press is still, after the people, the first of powers.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Peoples among whom [freedom of the press] exists cling to their opinions out of pride as much as out of conviction.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Deep convictions are found only at the two ends [of science], and in the middle lies doubt.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In centuries of doubt, one does not get killed so easily for one's opinions; but one does not change them, and there are, at the same time, fewer martyrs and fewer apostates.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, parties do not write books to combat one another, but pamphlets which circulate with incredible rapidity, live for a day, and then die.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Any aristocracy that sets itself completely apart from the people becomes powerless. This is as true in letters as it is in politics.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
By dint of wanting to speak differently from the common people, [elites] will arrive at a sort of aristocratic jargon which is hardly less distant from fine language than the people's dialect.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocracies, style will appear almost as important as the idea, form as much as substance; the tone will be polished, moderate, and sustained.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocracies, [readers] prefer to be amused rather than keenly moved; they want to be interested, but not to be carried away.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic nations, each new generation is a new people.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, it is almost impossible that [literature] should ever be subject to permanent rules.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, [readers] like books that are easily procured, that are quickly read, and that require no scholarly research to be understood.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Readers in democracies] demand easy beauties that offer themselves up... above all, they must have the unexpected and the new.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Accustomed to a practical, contested, monotonous existence, [people] need strong and rapid emotions, sudden insights, brilliant truths or errors.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The literature of democratic centuries... form will ordinarily be neglected, and sometimes scorned. The style will often be bizarre, incorrect... and almost always bold and vehement.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Democratic] authors will aim for speed of execution more than perfection of detail. Short writings will be more frequent than long books.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They will seek to astonish rather than to please, and will strive to stir the passions more than to charm the taste.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There are transient but very brilliant eras: one then has fecundity without exuberance, and movement without confusion.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The connections between the social and political state of a people and the genius of its writers are always numerous; whoever knows the one is never completely ignorant of the other.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What is happening [...] is not an isolated event. It is a particular movement amidst the general movement that is rushing the entire old edifice of Europe's institutions to its ruin.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One finds in it at the same time much wit and little freedom of mind.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To effectively enlighten [democracy] on the imperfection of its laws, the first condition is not to hate it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy there is less a regular form of government than a weapon that has been habitually used to destroy [...] the old society.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Liberty presented itself [...] only in the form of a privilege, and the idea of a general and pre-existing right of all men to be free [...] remained [...] foreign to their minds.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Each century has its dominant spirit which nothing can resist. Should [...] contrary principles be introduced under its reign, it soon penetrates them, and [...] assimilates them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Decrees make of secondary laws something as rapid and as irresistible as the passions of a multitude.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is the judicial power which is primarily destined, in democracies, to be at once the barrier and the safeguard of the people.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Justice is a power of tradition and opinion that needs to be supported by judicial ideas and customs.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The laws [of some] are arranged so as to fight against the natural defects of democracy, [while those of others] seem, on the contrary, made to develop them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It cannot be denied that institutions have a certain virtue of their own, and that by themselves they contribute to the prosperity or misery of societies.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The power of a federal government resides far less in the extent of the rights conferred upon it than in the ability [...] it is allowed to exercise them by itself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[A government] is always strong when it can command the citizens; it is always weak when it is reduced to commanding only the local governments.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The advent of democracy has divided all the Swiss [...] into two parties: one, favorable to democratic principles; the other, contrary.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The federal government is destined to acquire more power day by day [...]. It will grow much in fact, even if it remains the same in law.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is more difficult than one thinks to find the wilderness today.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[Our curiosity was to] visit some of those Indian tribes who preferred to flee into the wildest solitudes rather than submit to what whites call the delights of social life.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Where you see the most beautiful church in the village, one told us, I cut down the first tree of the forest.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The Indians, [...] it is a race that is dying out. They are not made for civilization; it kills them.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Man gets used to everything, to death on the battlefields, to death in hospitals, to killing and to suffering. He gets used to every sight.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
An ancient people, the first and legitimate master of the American continent, melts every day like snow in the sun's rays, and disappears from the face of the earth before our very eyes.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
This incredible destruction, this even more surprising growth, the American gets used to it as if to the immutable order of nature.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Deserts become villages, villages become cities.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I was full of the memories of M. de Chateaubriand and Cooper, and I expected to see [...] savages on whose faces nature would have left the trace of some of those haughty virtues that the spirit of freedom engenders.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[Their] physiognomy announced that profound depravity that only a long abuse of the benefits of civilization can produce.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To the vices they took from us was mixed something barbaric and uncivilized which made them a hundred times more repulsive still.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It would be wrong, however, to judge the Indian race on this formless sample, this stray offshoot of a wild tree that has grown in the mud of our cities.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Never had the silence of the forest seemed to me more chilling, its shadows darker, or its solitude so complete.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Lands produce less by reason of their fertility than of the freedom of their inhabitants.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The effect has outlived the cause.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The aristocracy sometimes tyrannized him, but it never abandoned him.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Come and see what becomes of a forsaken class, which no one has the inclination to tyrannize over, but which no one attempts to enlighten and to serve.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
[One can see] what barbarous laws may be founded and maintained in civilized ages, when the most enlightened men of the nation have no personal interest in changing them.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Under this tax system, every taxpayer had a direct and permanent interest in spying on his neighbors and denouncing to the collector the progress of their wealth; they were all trained to envy, denunciation, and hatred.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
If the people were comfortable, [...] they would hardly remain within the rules.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It is still believed that the peasant would not work if he were not constantly spurred on by necessity: poverty appears to be the only guarantee against laziness.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The progress of society, which enriches all other classes, drives him to despair; civilization itself turns against him alone.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
One must be wary of the cheerfulness the Frenchman often shows in his greatest misfortunes; it only proves that, believing his ill fortune to be inevitable, he seeks to distract himself by not thinking about it, not that he does not feel it.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It is only with great difficulty that men of the upper classes ever succeed in clearly discerning what is passing in the soul of the people [...].
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
When the poor and the rich have almost no common interests, common grievances, or common business, the darkness that hides the mind of one from the mind of the other becomes unfathomable [...].
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It is curious to see in what strange security all those who occupied the upper and middle floors of the social edifice lived [...], and to hear them discoursing [...] on the virtues of the people, [...] when '93 is already under their feet: a ridiculous and terrible spectacle!
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Almost all the vices, [...] errors, [...] and fatal prejudices [...] owed their birth, [...] their duration, [...] or their development to the art that most of our kings had of dividing men, in order to govern them more absolutely.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
He has sometimes been seen to carry the tastes of a slave into the very use of his liberty, as incapable of self-government as he had been harsh to his teachers.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
I prefer to repeat myself sometimes than not to be understood, and I would rather harm the author than the subject.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Unitary peoples are thus naturally inclined towards centralization, and confederations towards dismemberment.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The government [...] watches over the general interests of the country; but the general interests of a people have only a debatable influence on individual happiness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Patriotism, which is most often merely an extension of individual selfishness, has therefore remained in the State and has, so to speak, not passed to the Union.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A government, however strong, can hardly escape the consequences of a principle, once it has admitted that principle itself as the foundation of the public law that is to govern it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What keeps a large number of citizens under the same government is much less the reasoned will to remain united than the instinctive and somewhat involuntary agreement that results from the similarity of feelings and the resemblance of opinions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is a society only when men consider a great number of objects from the same perspective; when, on a great number of subjects, they have the same opinions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All have a lively faith in human perfectibility; they judge that the diffusion of enlightenment must necessarily produce useful results, and ignorance bring about fatal effects.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Some] are not far from believing that they form a separate species of mankind.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The slave is a servant who does not argue and submits to everything without a murmur. Sometimes he assassinates his master, but he never resists him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The man born to command] is haughty, quick, irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles; but easily discouraged if he cannot triumph at the first blow.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The weak rarely have confidence in the justice and reason of the strong.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If, since the beginning of the world, peoples and kings had only had their real utility in view, we would hardly know what war among men is.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The greatest danger that threatens the United States arises from its prosperity itself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The popular leader] is the slave of the majority: he follows its will, its desires, its half-discovered instincts, or rather he intuits them and runs to place himself at its head.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Parties are an evil inherent in free governments; but they do not always have the same character and the same instincts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What I call great political parties are those which attach themselves to principles more than to their consequences; to generalities and not to particular cases; to ideas and not to men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Small parties, on the contrary, are generally without political faith. [...] their character is stamped with a selfishness which is ostentatiously displayed in each of their acts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Great parties convulse society, small ones agitate it; the former tear it apart and the latter debase it; the former sometimes save it by shaking it, while the latter always disturb it for no gain.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I confess that I do not have for the liberty of the press that complete and instantaneous love which one accords to things that are sovereignly good by nature. I love it for the evils it prevents far more than for the good it does.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In matters of the press, there is therefore really no middle ground between servitude and license. To reap the inestimable benefits that freedom of the press provides, one must know how to submit to the inevitable evils it gives rise to.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the only way to neutralize the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Peoples among whom this liberty exists cling to their opinions as much out of pride as out of conviction. They love them because they seem just, and also because they are of their own choosing.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the doubt of opinions, men end up attaching themselves solely to instincts and material interests, which are much more visible, more tangible, and more permanent in their nature than opinions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to fight against the evils and embarrassments of life; he casts only a defiant and anxious glance upon social authority [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In our time, freedom of association has become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no country where associations are more necessary, to prevent the despotism of parties or the arbitrariness of the prince, than those where the social state is democratic.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In Europe, we have difficulty judging the true character and permanent instincts of democracy, because in Europe there is a struggle between two contrary principles [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is impossible, whatever one does, to raise the enlightenment of the people above a certain level. [...] For this [limit] not to exist, the people would have to not be occupied with the material cares of life, that is to say, they would no longer be the people.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. This complete equality escapes the people's grasp daily, just at the moment they believe they have seized it, and flees [...] in an eternal flight.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To wish to give a slave the opinions, habits, and morals of a free man is to condemn him to remain a slave forever.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
There exists, in fact, a deep and natural antipathy between the institution of marriage and that of slavery.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
How can one enlighten and strengthen a man's reason, so long as he is kept in a state where it is useless and could be harmful for him to reason?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
Christianity is a religion of free men; and they fear that by developing it in the souls of their slaves, some of the instincts of freedom might be awakened.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
How can one impart the idea of moral dignity to one who is nothing in his own eyes?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
It would be unreasonable to believe that one could destroy in servitude the vices that servitude naturally and necessarily gives birth to.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
Only the experience of freedom [...] can suggest and give to man the opinions, virtues, and habits that befit the citizen of a free country.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
Slavery is one of those institutions that last a thousand years if no one thinks to ask why it exists, but which it is almost impossible to maintain the day that question is asked.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
The uncertainty of their near future weighs upon the colonies with an immense weight; it stifles their intelligence and breaks their courage.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
Humanity and morality have often called for [...] the abolition of slavery. Today, it is political necessity that imposes it.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
[...] the idea of labor [...] was inextricably linked to the idea of servitude. One does not merely avoid work as a painful effort; one flees it as a dishonor.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
Man has never had the right to own man, and the fact of possession has always been and still is illegitimate.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
A great injustice was committed by both sides: both must contribute to repairing it.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
What is to be feared from emancipation is not the violent death of our colonies, but their gradual decay [...] through the cessation [...] of labor.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
Only a prosperous colonial society can easily bear the transition from servitude to freedom.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on Slavery
We have not yet seen societies where conditions were so equal that there were no rich or poor; and consequently no masters and servants.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy does not prevent [certain] classes of men from existing; but it changes their spirit and modifies their relationships.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Because a class is low, one must not believe that all its members have a low heart. That would be a great mistake.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocracies, the master often exercises, even without his own knowledge, a prodigious empire over the opinions, habits, and mores of those who obey him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocracy, the master and the servant become assimilated [...]; whereas in democracies, where they are almost alike, they always remain strangers to one another.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In [aristocracy], the servant ends up losing interest in himself [...] he transports himself entirely into his master; it is there that he creates an imaginary personality for himself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality of conditions makes new beings of the servant and the master, and establishes new relationships between them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Naturally [the servant and the master] are not inferior to one another; they only become so momentarily by the effect of the contract.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In vain do wealth and poverty [...] place great distances between two men; public opinion [...] brings them closer to the common level.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among democratic peoples, the servant and the master are very close; their bodies are in constant contact; their souls do not mingle.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What is most important to find among men is not a certain order, but order itself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the secret of his soul, the master [of a bygone era] still believes himself to be of a superior species; but he dares not say so, and allows himself to be drawn, trembling, towards the level.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Obedience loses its morality in the eyes of the one who obeys; [...] in his eyes it is neither holy nor just, and he submits to it as to a degrading and useful fact.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They consent to serve, and they are ashamed to obey; they love the advantages of servitude, but not the master.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Such a state is not democratic, but revolutionary.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What is most apparent in the actions of the bourgeoisie is the fear of being mistaken for the common people, and the passionate desire to escape their control by any means.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The legitimate pride of the citizen is forgotten in the incessant friction of the self-esteem of these small groups.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Our fathers did not have the word 'individualism' [...], but each of the thousand small groups that made up society thought only of itself. It was [...] a kind of collective individualism.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Each man clung to his particular status only because others had their own particular status; but they were all ready to merge into a single mass, provided that no one had any special advantage or rose above the common level.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The destruction of political liberty and the separation of classes caused almost all the diseases of which the Old Regime died.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
From the day the nation [...] allowed its kings to establish a general tax without its consent, [...] the seed was sown for almost all vices and almost all abuses.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
From the moment the object of the tax was not to reach those most able to pay it, but those least able to defend themselves from it, one was led to the monstrous consequence of sparing the rich and burdening the poor.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The division of classes was the crime of the old monarchy, and later became its excuse.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It is no small undertaking to bring together fellow citizens who have thus lived for centuries as strangers or enemies, and to teach them to conduct their own affairs in common.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Amidst many institutions already prepared for absolute power, liberty lived on; but it was a singular kind of liberty, [...] which one must examine very closely to understand the good and the evil it may have done us.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The French, who endure absolute power patiently enough as long as it is not oppressive, never like the sight of it.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
One must be very careful [...] not to measure men's baseness by the degree of their submission to sovereign power: that would be to use a false standard.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It would be quite wrong, then, to believe that the Old Regime was a time of servility and dependence. Much more liberty reigned then than in our day; but it was an irregular and intermittent kind of liberty [...].
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Every public passion was thus disguised as philosophy; political life was violently forced into literature, and writers [...] for a moment found themselves holding the place that party leaders usually occupy in free countries.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Free institutions are no less necessary to the leading citizens, to teach them their perils, than to the least of them, to secure their rights.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
I was convinced that, unbeknownst to them, they [the French] had retained from the old regime most of the sentiments, habits, and even ideas with which they had conducted the Revolution that destroyed it [...].
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
In countries where public administration is already powerful, few ideas, desires, or sorrows arise [...] that do not sooner or later expose themselves before it.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
There are many laws and political habits of the old regime that disappear [...] in 1789 and reappear a few years later, just as some rivers sink into the earth only to re-emerge a little further on [...].
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
[The era of '89 was a] time of youth, enthusiasm, pride, of generous and sincere passions, which, despite its errors, men will eternally remember, and which [...] will disturb the sleep of all who wish to corrupt or enslave them.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The destiny of individuals is even more obscure than that of peoples.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Despotism [...] removes from citizens any common passion, any mutual need, any necessity to communicate, any opportunity to act together; it walls them up, so to speak, in private life.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Liberty alone [...] can effectively combat [...] the vices that are natural [...] and hold them back on the slope down which they are sliding. [...] It alone is capable of tearing them away from the worship of money.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
What will never be seen [...] in [democratic societies that are not free], are great citizens, and especially a great people, and [...] the common level of hearts and minds will never cease to sink so long as equality and despotism are combined therein.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Despots themselves do not deny that freedom is excellent; they only want it for themselves, and they maintain that all others are entirely unworthy of it.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The taste one shows for absolute government is in exact proportion to the contempt one professes for one's country.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
There is nothing better suited to remind philosophers and statesmen of modesty than the history of our Revolution; for there were never events greater, [...] better prepared, and less foreseen.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Great revolutions that succeed, by making the causes that produced them disappear, become incomprehensible precisely because of their success.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The French Revolution operated, with respect to this world, in precisely the same manner that religious revolutions act with a view to the other.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
As it [the Revolution] seemed to strive for the regeneration of the human race even more than for the reform of France, it ignited a passion that [...] the most violent political revolutions had never been able to produce.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
By destroying a part of the institutions of the Middle Ages, what was left of them was made a hundred times more odious.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
One might be led to believe that the necessary effect of democratic institutions is to merge citizens in private as well as in public life. This is to understand equality in a very coarse way.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no social state or law that can make men so similar that education, fortune, and tastes do not place some difference between them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men will always [...] escape the hand of the legislator; and [...] will establish, alongside the great political society, small private societies.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Americans, who mingle so easily in political assemblies, take great care to divide themselves into small associations in order to enjoy the pleasures of private life separately.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The democratic man] willingly recognizes all his fellow citizens as his equals, but he receives only a very small number of them among his friends and guests.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the circle of public society expands, one must expect the sphere of private relations to shrink.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Instead of imagining that the citizens of new societies will end up living in common, I fear they will eventually form nothing but very small coteries.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among aristocratic peoples, the different classes are like vast enclosures, from which one cannot leave and into which one cannot enter.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, [...] a multitude of artificial and arbitrary classifications are created, by means of which each person seeks to set himself apart, for fear of being unwillingly swept into the crowd.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One can change human institutions, but not man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whatever the effort of a society to make citizens equal, the particular pride of individuals will always seek to escape the level and will want to form some inequality from which to profit.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocracies, men are separated from one another by high, immovable barriers.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, [men] are divided by a multitude of small, almost invisible threads, which are broken at every moment and constantly change place.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whatever the progress of equality, a great number of small private associations will always be formed among democratic peoples in the midst of the great political society.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In ordinary times, I would have withdrawn immediately; but the gravity of the situation made me stay.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It was obvious that he only agreed to take us on to save the initial moment, and that he fully intended [...] to cast us aside.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
We found the king still very calm and in his usual ordinary manner.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Being unable to have anything printed and posted in time, I considered myself a human poster.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I advanced unarmed before each barricade; the guns were lowered, the barricades opened...
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Upon my return, I found the people more agitated than when I passed; yet I did not hear a single seditious cry, nothing that announced an immediate revolution.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
If the king does not abdicate, we will have a revolution before eight o'clock this evening.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
To go [...] at the head of this multitude was to make myself absolute master of the situation, but by an act that could have seemed revolutionary and violent.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
If I had known what was happening at that moment [...], I would not have hesitated.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The attitude of the people did not yet seem decided.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I could not, therefore, imagine the panic which, shortly after, would put [power] into the hands of the multitude.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I asked myself what I had to do.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I had not yet eaten and I was exhausted.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The king has abdicated; all the troops are withdrawing.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
My intention had been [...] to put them on horseback and to throw myself with them among the people.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In times of revolution, people boast almost as much of the alleged crimes they want to commit as, in ordinary times, of the good intentions they claim to have.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[The happy man] enjoys by a gift of nature that happy balance between faculties and desires, which alone provides the happiness that philosophy promises.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
...a keen curiosity made its way through all the feelings that filled my soul and, from time to time, dominated them.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I would never have imagined war in this light.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
...it was less the sight of physical pain than the picture of moral anguish that struck me. [...] It was a frightening thing to see [...] the fire in the eyes suddenly extinguish in the terror of death.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[Certain fighters] showed that it was the fight they loved far more than the cause for which they fought.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Not everything is always heroic in the game of war; [...] no one boasts about it and the bulletins do not speak of it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Great peril is like wine; it makes men tender.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I know of [...] nothing more foolish than a man who gets his head smashed in war out of curiosity.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
...with what frightening speed [...] the most peaceful souls attune themselves [...] to civil wars, and how the taste for violence and contempt for human life suddenly spread.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I could not help but be astonished [...] at the speed with which I had, in two days, familiarized myself with these ideas of inexorable destruction that were naturally so foreign to me.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
So great is the vitality of these old aristocratic bodies. They retain a trace of themselves when they already seem reduced to dust, and rise several times from the shadows of death before falling back into them forever.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The love of independence was to be succeeded by fear and perhaps disgust for free institutions; after such an abuse of liberty, such a reversal was inevitable.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I, who [...] cared little for the republic, but adored liberty, conceived, from the day after these events, great apprehensions for it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Socialist theories continued to penetrate the minds of the people in the form of greedy and envious passions, and to deposit there the seed of future revolutions.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
What is happening [...] is not an isolated event. It is a particular movement amidst the general movement that is rushing the entire old edifice of Europe's institutions to its ruin.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
If the stage is small, the spectacle has [...] greatness; above all, it has a singular originality.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To [criticize] effectively, the first condition is not to hate.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Democracy there is less a regular form of government than a weapon that has been habitually used to destroy [...] the old society.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Liberty presented itself [...] only in the form of a privilege, and the idea of a general right [...] for all men to be free [...] remained [...] foreign to their minds.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Each century has its dominant spirit which nothing can resist. [...] If contrary principles are introduced under its reign, [...] it appropriates and assimilates them.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is the judicial power which is mainly destined, in democracies, to be at once the barrier and the safeguard of the people.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Justice is a power of tradition and opinion which needs to be supported by judicial ideas and customs.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Laws [...] are designed to combat the natural flaws of democracy, [others] seem on the contrary made to develop them. Here they restrain the people, there they push them.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
One cannot deny that institutions have a certain virtue of their own, and that by themselves they contribute to the prosperity or misery of societies.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The power of a federal government resides far less in the extent of the rights conferred upon it than in the faculty [...] it is allowed to exercise them by itself.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Never was a government better held in inertia and more condemned to impotence by the imperfection of its organs.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
From purely municipal, its existence has become national; a more laborious, more troubled, more precarious, and greater existence.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Power, exercised in the name of the people, but placed very far from them, was entirely handed over to the executive.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The Diet is a government that wants nothing for itself, but is confined to realizing what twenty-two other governments have separately wanted.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is of the very essence of democratic governments that the dominion of the majority be absolute; for outside the majority [...] there is nothing that resists.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The moral empire of the majority is based [...] on the idea that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in many men combined than in one [...]. It is the theory of equality applied to intelligence.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Legislative instability is an evil inherent in democratic government, because it is in the nature of democracies to bring new men to power.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, much more zeal and activity are brought to certain improvements than is done elsewhere. In Europe, an infinitely smaller, but more continuous, social force is employed for these same things.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I regard as impious and detestable the maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do anything.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I am not denying the majority's right to command; I am simply appealing from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What then is a majority taken collectively, if not an individual who has opinions and [...] interests contrary to another individual called the minority?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Omnipotence seems to me in itself a bad and dangerous thing. Its exercise seems to me beyond the strength of any man, whoever he may be [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it be called people or king [...] I say: there is the seed of tyranny.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What I find most repugnant in America is not the extreme liberty that reigns there, but the lack of guarantees against tyranny.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Thought is an invisible and almost intangible power that defies all tyrannies.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I know of no country in which there is generally less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Within these limits the writer is free; but woe to him if he dares to step out of it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The majority] says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your possessions, everything remains yours; but from this day forward you are a stranger among us. [...] Go in peace, I grant you your life, but it is a life worse than death.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If freedom is ever lost in America, the cause will be the omnipotence of the majority, which will have driven minorities to despair and compelled them to appeal to physical force.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Violent and uncertain agitation of the human spirit [...]
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
How [...] the vague agitation of the human spirit suddenly became [...] a positive passion.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[...] just when they believed they were masters of the state, [they] suddenly discovered they were nothing.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
As soon as absolute power was vanquished, the true spirit of the revolution suddenly revealed itself.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[...] just as they were about to assemble [...], minds suddenly expanded and souls were uplifted.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
On the role that money plays [...]
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The legislative spirit [...]
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The spirit of association and exclusion.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[Ideas relating to] centralization and the introduction of judicial power into the administration.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[On the] influence of the political constitution on commercial prosperity.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
How aristocracy can form one of the best and one of the worst governments in the world.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Freedom of commerce [...]. Industrial prosperity without tariffs or customs.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is difficult to conceive of a lasting union between two peoples, one of whom is poor and weak, the other rich and strong [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The weak rarely have confidence in the justice and reason of the strong.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It seems to them that they are becoming poorer because they are not getting rich as fast as their neighbor, and they believe they are losing their power because they suddenly come into contact with a greater power than theirs.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If, since the beginning of the world, peoples and kings had only had their real utility in view, we would hardly know what war is among men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Thus the greatest danger that threatens the United States arises from their very prosperity.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
From the moment a strong government no longer seemed necessary, people began to think it was a nuisance.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The majority itself is not all-powerful. Above it, in the moral world, are humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It has been discovered in our days that there are legitimate tyrannies and holy injustices in the world, provided they are exercised in the name of the people.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Left to themselves, men will always prefer the arbitrary power of a king to the regular administration of nobles.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The republic, [...] is not the reign of the majority, [...] it is the reign of those who vouch for the majority.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
For an American, his whole life is passed like a game of chance, a time of revolution, or a day of battle.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The idea of the new is [...] intimately linked in his mind with the idea of the better. [...] in his eyes, what is not, is what has not yet been tried.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I think that nations, like men, almost always indicate, from their youth, the principal features of their destiny.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There are today on earth two great peoples who, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: these are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The American] has liberty for his principal means of action; [the Russian], servitude. [...] each of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold in his hands the destinies of half the world.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
We the people [...] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility [...] and to secure for ourselves and for our posterity the blessings of liberty, we do [...] establish this Constitution.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Congress shall make no law relative to the establishment of a religion, or to prohibit one; nor may it restrict the freedom of speech or of the press.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be restricted.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The right of citizens to enjoy the security of their persons, their homes, their papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In any criminal case, the accused may not be forced to testify against himself; nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, except through due legal process.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
No private property shall be taken for public use without just compensation.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In all criminal proceedings, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The enumeration in this constitution of certain rights shall not be interpreted in a manner that excludes or weakens other rights retained by the people.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except in cases of rebellion or invasion, and when public safety requires it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
No religious oath shall ever be required as a condition for holding any office or public charge.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Treason [...] shall consist only in taking up arms against [the country] or in joining its enemies by giving them aid and comfort.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The free profession and exercise of all religious beliefs and forms of worship [...] are permitted to all; but freedom of conscience [...] cannot be extended to excuse licentious acts and practices incompatible with the peace and security of the State.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whereas the ministers of the Gospel are, by their profession, devoted to the service of God [...] and should not be distracted from the great duties of their station, no minister [...] may be called [...] to any civil or military office.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Every citizen may freely express, write, and publish his opinion on any subject, and remains responsible for the abuse he may make of this right.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In our times, [...] the distance which formerly separated a father from his sons has been lessened, and paternal authority, if not destroyed, is at least altered.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, the family, in the Roman and aristocratic meaning of the word, does not exist.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence. At the close of boyhood, the man appears, and begins to trace out his own path.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There are certain great social principles which a people either introduces everywhere, or tolerates nowhere.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, [...] the father is, in the eyes of the law, only a citizen, older and richer than his sons.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When men live more in the remembrance of what has been, [...] the father is the natural and necessary link between the past and the present [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the state of society becomes democratic, [...] the power of opinion exercised by the father over his sons becomes less great, as does his legal power.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not know whether, on the whole, society loses by this change; but I am inclined to believe that the individual gains.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As manners and laws become more democratic, the relationship between father and son becomes more intimate and gentle [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the democratic family, the master and the magistrate have disappeared; the father remains.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is not by interests, but by the community of memories and the free sympathy of opinions [...] that democracy attaches brothers to one another.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Democracy] divides their inheritance, but it allows their souls to mingle.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy, which destroys [...] old social conventions [...] only modifies [natural feelings], and often gives them an energy and a gentleness they did not possess.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy loosens social ties, but it tightens natural ones. It brings relatives closer together at the same time as it separates citizens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the long run, political society cannot fail to become the expression and image of civil society.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In our times, [...] the distance that once separated a father from his sons has been diminished, and paternal authority, if not destroyed, has at least been altered.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
From the moment the young American approaches manhood, the bonds of filial obedience loosen day by day. Master of his thoughts, he soon becomes master of his conduct.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There are certain great social principles that a people either makes penetrate everywhere or allows to subsist nowhere.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, [...] the father is in the eyes of the law only a citizen, older and richer than his sons.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When men differ little from one another [...], the general notion of a superior becomes weaker and less clear.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When men live in the memory of what has been, [...] the father is the natural and necessary link between the past and the present, the ring where these two chains meet and join.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the social state becomes democratic, [...] it is good and legitimate to judge all things for oneself, taking ancient beliefs as information and not as a rule.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not know if, on the whole, society loses from this [democratic] change; but I am inclined to believe that the individual gains.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As manners and laws become more democratic, the relationship between father and son becomes more intimate and gentle; [...] confidence and affection are often greater.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[In the democratic family,] the master and the magistrate have disappeared; the father remains.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is not through interests, but through the community of memories and the free sympathy of opinions and tastes, that democracy binds brothers to one another.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When a certain way of thinking or feeling is the product of a particular state of humanity, once that state changes, nothing of it remains.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is rare that the law, in striving to bend [natural feelings] in a certain way, does not weaken them; [...] they are not always stronger when left to themselves.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy, which destroys or obscures almost all old social conventions, [...] causes most of the feelings that arise from these conventions to disappear entirely.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy loosens social bonds, but it tightens natural ones. It brings relatives closer together at the same time as it separates citizens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Poetry, in my eyes, is the search for and the painting of the ideal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, the love of material pleasures, the idea of betterment, competition, the imminent charm of success, are like so many goads that quicken the steps of every man in the career he has embraced [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[In democracies,] the imagination is not extinguished; but it devotes itself almost exclusively to conceiving the useful and representing the real.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past [...]. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a kind of instinctive distaste for what is old.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic societies, where men are all [...] very much alike, each one, in considering himself, sees at once all the others.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality, by establishing itself on earth, dries up most of the ancient sources of poetry.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I am convinced that in the long run democracy turns the imagination away from all that is external to man, to fix it only on man himself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democratic peoples are little concerned with what has been; but they willingly dream of what will be, and in this direction, their imagination has no limits [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy, which closes the past to poetry, opens the future to it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One can conceive of nothing so [...] anti-poetic, in a word, as the life of a man in the United States; but among the thoughts that guide it, there is always one that is full of poetry [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic centuries, [...] nations themselves assimilate, and all together form, in the eye of the spectator, only one vast democracy in which each citizen is a people.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All that relates to the existence of the human race as a whole, to its vicissitudes, to its future, becomes a very fertile mine for poetry.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I have only to consider myself: man emerges from nothingness, passes through time, and is to disappear [...]. He is seen for only a moment wandering on the edge of the two abysses where he is lost.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Man is sufficiently revealed for him to perceive something of himself, and sufficiently veiled for the rest to sink into impenetrable darkness [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The destinies of humanity, man, taken apart from his time and his country, and placed in the face of nature and of God, [...] will become for these peoples the principal and almost the sole object of poetry.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality develops in each man the desire to judge everything for himself; it gives him, in all things, a taste for the tangible and the real, a contempt for traditions and forms.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Those who cultivate the sciences among democratic peoples are always afraid of losing themselves in utopias. They are wary of systems, they like to stick very close to the facts [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Nothing is more necessary to the cultivation of the higher sciences [...] than meditation, and there is nothing less suited to meditation than the inner workings of a democratic society.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the midst of this universal tumult, this repeated clash of contrary interests, [...] where can one find the calm necessary for the deep combinations of the intellect?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Within these nations there reigns a slight, awkward motion, a sort of incessant jostling of men against one another, which troubles and distracts the mind without enlivening or elevating it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Not only do men who live in democratic societies find it difficult to meditate, but they naturally have little esteem for it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The man of action is often reduced to being content with approximations, because he would never reach the end of his design if he wished to perfect every detail.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In centuries where almost everyone is in action, one is [...] inclined to attach an excessive value to the quick bursts and superficial conceptions of the intellect, and [...] to undervalue its deep and slow work.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is a desire to utilize knowledge and a pure desire to know.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not doubt that there arises, from time to time, [...] an ardent and inexhaustible love of truth, which feeds on itself and enjoys itself unceasingly without ever being able to be satisfied.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocratic centuries, the pleasures of the mind are particularly sought from the sciences; in democracies, the pleasures of the body.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In a [democratic] society, the human mind is imperceptibly led to neglect theory, and [...] feels itself pushed with unparalleled energy towards application.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In our day, the human mind must be kept to theory; it runs of its own accord to practice.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the light that illuminates us were ever to be extinguished, it would fade little by little [...]. By dint of confining ourselves to application, we would lose sight of the principles.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
We should not, therefore, reassure ourselves by thinking that the barbarians are still far from us; for if there are peoples who allow the light to be snatched from their hands, there are others who trample it under their own feet.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If each citizen, as he becomes individually weaker, [...] did not learn the art of uniting with his fellows to defend his liberty, tyranny would necessarily grow with equality.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Wherever, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The most democratic country on earth happens to be the one [...] where men have, in our day, most perfected the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among democratic peoples, [...] all citizens are independent and weak; they can do almost nothing by themselves. [...] They all, therefore, fall into impotence if they do not learn to help each other freely.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A people among whom individuals lost the power of doing great things single-handedly, without acquiring the faculty of producing them in common, would soon fall back into barbarism.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The more [the social power] takes the place of associations, the more individuals, losing the idea of associating, will need its help: these are causes and effects that endlessly generate one another.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in no less danger than its business and industry, if the government were to take the place of associations everywhere.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the human mind developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A government can no more suffice on its own to maintain and renew the circulation of sentiments and ideas in a great people than to conduct all its industrial undertakings.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As soon as a government tries to leave the political sphere [...], it will exercise, even without intending to, an insufferable tyranny; for a government only knows how to dictate precise rules.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is associations that, among democratic peoples, must take the place of the powerful individuals whom equality of conditions has caused to disappear.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As soon as several people [...] have conceived a feeling or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out, and when they have found each other, they unite. Thenceforth they are no longer isolated men, but a power one sees from afar.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic countries, the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
For men to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as the equality of conditions increases.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The taste for money and the thirst for consideration and power become so intermingled [...] that it becomes difficult to discern whether men are greedy out of ambition, or ambitious out of greed.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As we draw near, traces of destruction announce the presence of civilized man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the log-house [...] one finds more of the superfluous and less of the necessary.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This dwelling forms, by itself, a small world; it is the ark of civilization lost in an ocean of foliage.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality of conditions never creates moral corruption, but sometimes it allows it to appear.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
National pride, the satisfaction afforded by legislation to certain dominant passions, [...] can for a long time create an illusion for an entire people as well as for one man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The love a people shows for its laws proves only one thing: that one must not be in a hurry to change them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is nothing more dangerous for the liberty and tranquility of a people than an army that fears war.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To force all men to march in the same way, towards the same object, that is a human idea. To introduce infinite variety in actions [...] towards the fulfillment of a great design, that is a divine idea.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men believe they show their greatness by simplifying the means; it is God's object that is simple, His means vary infinitely.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Almost all ambitious and capable citizens [...] will work relentlessly to extend the powers of social authority, because all hope to direct it one day.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among the public men of democracies, there are hardly any but the very disinterested or the very mediocre who wish to decentralize power. The first are rare and the second are powerless.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The people become an image of the army, and society is run like a barracks.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They [despotism and anarchy] rise because nothing resists them, and they fall because nothing sustains them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What is important to combat, therefore, is not so much anarchy or despotism as the apathy which can create either almost indifferently.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Frightened bourgeois, but above all astonished, like spectators who, having reached the denouement, have not yet quite understood the play.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[There are men] so in love with action [...] that after having done the necessary and useful things, they are always ready to undertake the harmful and dangerous ones rather than do nothing at all.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The very history of our own days, however new and unforeseen it may seem, always belongs in its essence to the old history of humanity, and what we call new facts are most often only forgotten ones.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It was not merely a question of making a party triumph; the aspiration was to found a social science, a philosophy, I might almost say a religion, to be [...] followed by all men.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It was an extraordinary and terrible thing to see in the sole hands of those who possessed nothing, all this immense city, full of so much wealth...
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The terror of all the other classes was [...] comparable to that which the civilized cities of the Roman world must have felt when they suddenly saw themselves in the power of the Vandals and the Goths.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The first movements [of the people], in times of revolution, are ordinarily generous [...] and when they finally wish to descend to the level of small and evil human passions, they are no longer free to do so.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
A sort of morality peculiar to disorder has formed among us, and a special code for riot days. According to these exceptional laws, murder is tolerated, [...] but theft is severely forbidden.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In politics [...] the community of hatred almost always forms the basis of friendships.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[The middle class] lacks homogeneity [...] which makes its government weak, but makes it itself elusive and as if invisible to those who wish to strike it when it no longer governs.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
They made the tepid passions of the time speak in the inflamed language of '93, and they cited [...] illustrious scoundrels, whom they had neither the energy nor even the sincere desire to resemble.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Socialism will remain the essential character and the most formidable memory of the revolution [...]. The republic will appear from afar only as a means and not an end.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
How could poor, inferior, and yet powerful classes not have thought of escaping their poverty and inferiority by using their power...?
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It was inevitable that he would eventually [...] discover that what confined him in his position was not the constitution of the government, but the immutable laws that constitute society itself.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
What are called necessary institutions are often only the institutions to which one is accustomed, and [...] the field of the possible is much vaster than the men who live in each society imagine.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Democracy does not bind men strongly to one another; but it makes their habitual relationships easier.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When birth alone [...] ranks men, each one knows precisely the point he occupies on the social scale; he does not seek to rise, and does not fear to fall.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When the aristocracy of birth is succeeded by the aristocracy of money, things are no longer the same.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Those who possess [privileges] are constantly preoccupied by the fear of losing them or seeing them shared; and those who do not yet have them want to possess them at all costs...
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the social value of men is no longer fixed in an ostensible and permanent way by blood, [...] ranks still exist, but one can no longer see clearly and at first glance who occupies them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A silent war is immediately established between all citizens; some strive [...] to penetrate [...] among those who are above them; others fight ceaselessly to repel these usurpers of their rights.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] the same man does both things, and while he seeks to introduce himself into the higher sphere, he struggles relentlessly against the effort that comes from below.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Aristocratic pride still being very great [...], and the limits of the aristocracy having become uncertain, everyone fears at every moment that their familiarity will be taken advantage of.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Unable to judge at first glance the social situation of those one meets, one prudently avoids entering into contact with them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One dreads, in rendering small services, to form an ill-suited friendship in spite of oneself; one fears good offices...
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, where privileges of birth have never existed, [...] strangers willingly gather in the same places, and find neither advantage nor peril in freely communicating their thoughts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Their manner is [...] natural, frank, and open; one sees that they hope and fear almost nothing from one another, and that they do not strive any more to show than to hide the position they occupy.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When [Americans] do not speak to one another, it is because they are not in the mood to talk, and not because they believe it is in their interest to be silent.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In a foreign country, two Americans are friends at once, simply because they are Americans. [...] For two Englishmen, the same blood is not enough: the same rank must bring them together.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The reserve of the English stems from the constitution of the country far more than from that of its citizens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Almost all the tastes and habits that arise from equality naturally lead men toward commerce and industry.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The cultivation of the land promises [...] almost certain results, but slow ones. One gets rich from it only little by little and with difficulty.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic countries, a man, however opulent, is almost always discontented with his fortune, because he finds himself less rich than his father was and fears that his sons will be less so than himself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The rich in democracies are] driven by the most imperious of all needs: that of not falling in status.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic countries, where money does not lead its possessor to power, but often bars him from it, the rich do not know what to do with their leisure.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, there is nothing greater or more brilliant than commerce; it is what attracts the public's gaze and fills the crowd's imagination.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Those who live amidst democratic instability constantly have before their eyes the image of chance, and they end up loving all enterprises in which chance plays a role.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Democratic peoples] are drawn to commerce, not only for the profit it promises them, but for the love of the emotions it provides.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What is most striking [in democracies] is not the extraordinary greatness of a few industrial enterprises, but the countless multitude of small ones.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A field is cleared to be sold, not to be harvested; a farm is built in the expectation that [...] one can get a good price for it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Democratic peoples] bring the spirit of business into agriculture, and their industrial passions are displayed there as elsewhere.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As everyone is more or less involved in industry, at the slightest shock that business experiences, all private fortunes stumble at the same time, and the State falters.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I believe that the return of industrial crises is an endemic disease in democratic nations [...]. It can be made less dangerous, but not cured.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is not commerce and industry that suggest the taste for material enjoyments to men, but rather this taste that leads men toward industrial and commercial careers.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All the causes that make the love of worldly goods predominate in the human heart develop commerce and industry. Equality is one of these causes.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Revolution did not happen because of [the] prosperity; but the spirit that was to produce it, that active, restless, intelligent, innovative, ambitious spirit [...] was beginning to animate all things...
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
This ability of nations to prosper despite the imperfection found in the secondary parts of their institutions, when the general principles [...] are fruitful.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
In any judicial organization there are secondary flaws that can cause only moderate harm [...], and other principal ones that not only harm it, but destroy it.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The same qualities can be secondary or principal, according to the times and the political organization of society.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
[There is a] more common, and especially more dangerous, kind of venality in democratic times, which arises from the servility of the courts to public power.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The administration [...] was composed of a multitude of different powers [...] Confusion and conflict could only be avoided on the condition that each acted little or not at all.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Political institutions had not become worse; on the contrary, they had greatly improved; but political life had become more active.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Functions [...] that are much more arduous than honorable, were bound to drive away all those who combined comfortable means with an education suited to their station.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
How the destruction of political liberty and the separation of classes caused nearly all the maladies of which the Old Regime died.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
How the French wanted reforms before they wanted liberties.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The reign of Louis XVI was the most prosperous era of the old monarchy, and [...] that very prosperity hastened the Revolution.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
How the people were stirred up while attempting to relieve them.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
How administrative centralization is an institution of the Old Regime, and not the work of the Revolution or the Empire, as is said.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Why feudal rights had become more odious to the people in France than anywhere else.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The rural communities are composed [...] of poor, ignorant, and brutish peasants, incapable of administering themselves.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The social state is [...] the primary cause of most of the laws, customs, and ideas that regulate the conduct of nations; what it does not produce, it modifies.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I am astonished that publicists [...] have not attributed to inheritance laws a greater influence in the course of human affairs.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Inheritance laws] should be placed at the head of all political institutions, for they have an incredible influence on the social state of peoples, of which political laws are only the expression.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Through [inheritance laws], man is armed with an almost divine power over the future of his fellow men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When the law of succession establishes equal partition, it destroys the intimate connection that existed between the spirit of family and the preservation of the land.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What is called family spirit is often founded on an illusion of individual selfishness. One seeks to perpetuate and immortalize oneself, in a way, in one's descendants.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Where the family spirit ends, individual selfishness returns to the reality of its inclinations. [...] Everyone concentrates on the convenience of the present.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I know of no country [...] where the love of money holds a larger place in the heart of man, and where a more profound contempt is professed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Fortune [...] circulates with incredible rapidity, and experience teaches that it is rare to see two generations reap its favors.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not think there is any country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few ignorant people and fewer learned men than in America.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Intellectual inequality comes directly from God, and man cannot prevent it from always being found.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is impossible to understand how equality could not end up penetrating the political world as it does elsewhere. [...] They will therefore, in a given time, come to be so on all [points].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I know of only two ways to make equality reign in the political world: to give rights to every citizen, or to give them to no one.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is found [...] in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What [democratic peoples] love with an eternal love is equality; [...] nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would rather perish than lose it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In him, the man is degraded as the workman is perfected.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making pinheads?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When a worker has thus consumed a considerable portion of his existence, [...] he no longer belongs to himself, but to the profession he has chosen.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
An industrial theory more powerful than customs and laws has tied him to a trade [...] which he cannot leave. [...] In the midst of universal movement, it has rendered him immobile.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the principle of the division of labor is more completely applied, the worker becomes weaker, more narrow-minded, and more dependent. The art progresses, the artisan retrogresses.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
While the worker increasingly focuses his intelligence on the study of a single detail, the master surveys a much larger whole, and his mind expands in proportion as the other's contracts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The one increasingly resembles the administrator of a vast empire, and the other a brute.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The master and the worker have nothing in common here [...]. The one is in a continual, close, and necessary dependence on the other, and seems born to obey as the latter is to command.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What is this, if not aristocracy?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the mass of the nation turns to democracy, the particular class engaged in industry becomes more aristocratic.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It seems that we see aristocracy emerge by a natural effort from the very heart of democracy.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Although there are rich people, the class of the rich does not exist; for these rich people have no common spirit or purpose, no common traditions or hopes. There are members, therefore, but no body.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no real bond between the poor and the rich. [...] The worker generally depends on masters, but not on a particular master.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The aristocracy founded by business [...] its purpose is not to govern [the industrial population], but to make use of it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If ever the permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy penetrate the world again, it can be predicted that they will enter through this gate.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As long as things go on this way, detailed improvements, administrative reforms, changes of men, will remain [...] ineffective. The most salutary advice will be lost, the best intentions will become sterile.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
Their complete submission, it is true, would complete the conquest [...]. But who was in a hurry to complete it?
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
Among [certain peoples], the form of government is as democratic as one can imagine; every man involves himself in public affairs; the authority that directs them is weak, and election constantly passes power from hand to hand.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
Does one believe that such a population will for long remain quiet under our empire, that it will obey us without being watched and suppressed by military establishments [...]?
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
The measure being taken today is therefore only the beginning of a long series of measures that will have to be taken; it is [...] the first step on a long road that must [...] be traveled.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
Was it not permissible to believe [...] that at a moment when peace was succeeding so well, one would not take up arms?
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
What is overabundant [...] are the central administrations; what is more or less lacking everywhere are the agents of execution.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
As the main and sometimes sole consumer, [the State] dominates the markets and sets the prices. If, taking advantage of this particular position, it were to paralyze production [...] it would not only harm the farmers [...] it would harm itself.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
What we want above all is to attach to our army, to our service, men of the country, who know the country and have influence there. Let us not be diverted from this second goal, which is the main one, by wanting to get too close to the first.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
The peaceful establishment of a European population on African soil would be the most effective means of establishing and guaranteeing our domination there.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
The country is occupied, it is true, but it is neither filled, nor, to tell the truth, possessed. [...] One can therefore introduce the conquering population onto the soil, without disturbing the vanquished population.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
Nowhere has the European cultivator become more easily and better acquainted with abandonment, [...] sickness, destitution, death, and brought a more virile and [...] more warlike soul to the adversities and perils of civil life.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
The result obtained by the State is entirely out of proportion with the effort made to achieve it.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
If the State were to leave the sphere of public interests to take in hand the private interests of the colonists [...] it would undertake a work that is both very costly and rather sterile.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
In matters of colonization [...], one must always return to this alternative: Either the economic conditions of the country will be such that those who come to live there can easily prosper [...] or [...] nothing can ever replace it.
1847
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy/Report on the Affairs of Africa
It would be wrong to believe that the periodical press has always been entirely free in America; attempts have been made to establish something analogous to prior censorship [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The newspaper evaded the ban [...], and public opinion finished by doing justice to the measure.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] which proves how democratic the English constitution became over time, even while appearing motionless.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The sheriff's position] places him above the suspicion of corruption by the parties [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One sees that the English founded their jury system not on capacity, but on land ownership, like all their other political institutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, all citizens who are electors have the right to be jurors.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] in the United States, the right to be part of a jury [...] extends to everyone; but the exercise of this right is not indiscriminately placed in all hands.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
These magistrates, being themselves elective, do not arouse distrust; their powers are very extensive and quite arbitrary, as is generally the case with republican magistrates [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Americans have sought by all possible means to bring the jury within the reach of the people, and to make it as little of a burden as possible.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Thus, the court comes to the jury, instead of drawing the jury to it, as in France.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, the jury is still regarded as a burden; but it is a burden that is easy to bear, and to which one submits without difficulty.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When one closely examines the constitution of the civil jury [...], one easily discovers that the jurors never escape the control of the judge.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The jury's verdict, in civil as in criminal cases, generally includes, in a simple statement, both the fact and the law.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
By introducing the jury in civil matters, the English did not preserve for the jurors' opinion the infallibility that they grant it in criminal matters [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the judge thinks that the verdict has made a false application of the law, he can refuse to receive it, and send the jurors back to deliberate.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I thought that many would take it upon themselves to announce the new benefits that equality promises to men, but that few would dare to point out from afar the perils with which it threatens them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions [...] to take tradition only as information, and present facts only as a useful study for doing things differently and better.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the midst of the continual movement that reigns within a democratic society, the link that unites generations is loosened or broken; each person easily loses the trace of their ancestors' ideas.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Each person therefore shuts himself up tightly within himself, and from there presumes to judge the world.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They willingly deny what they cannot understand: this gives them little faith for the extraordinary, and an almost invincible distaste for the supernatural.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Without common ideas, there is no common action, and, without common action, there are still men, but not a social body.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no philosopher in the world so great that he does not believe a million things on the faith of others, and who does not suppose many more truths than he establishes.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As citizens become more equal and more similar, [...] the disposition to believe the mass increases, and it is more and more opinion that leads the world.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The public in democratic nations has a singular power [...]. It does not persuade its beliefs, it imposes them and makes them penetrate into souls by a sort of immense pressure of the mind of all upon the intelligence of each.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men would not have found the way to live independently; they would only have discovered, a difficult thing, a new face of servitude.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
For my part, when I feel the hand of power weighing on my brow, it matters little to me to know who oppresses me, and I am no more disposed to place my head in the yoke because a million arms present it to me.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
General ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When religion is destroyed in a nation, doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect [...] and, as one despairs of being able to solve the greatest problems alone [...], one cowardly resigns to not thinking about them at all.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I am led to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocratic ages, what is demanded of the sciences is in particular the pleasures of the mind; in democracies, the pleasures of the body.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The equality of conditions and the softening of manners are not [...] merely contemporary events; they are [...] correlative facts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Real sympathies exist only between similar people; and in aristocratic centuries, one sees one's equals only in the members of one's caste.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic centuries, men rarely devote themselves to one another; but they show a general compassion for all members of the human species.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The same man who is full of humanity for his fellows when they are his equals becomes insensitive to their suffering as soon as equality ceases.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy does not bind men strongly to one another, but it makes their habitual relationships easier.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the social value of men is no longer fixed in an ostensible and permanent way [...], a silent war is immediately established among all citizens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality of conditions, at the same time that it makes men feel their independence, shows them their weakness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, where great boons are seldom granted, good offices are constantly rendered. It is rare for a man to show himself devoted, but all are helpful.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In centuries of equality, the human mind [...] easily figures that nothing remains. The idea of instability possesses it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What endangers society is not the great corruption among a few; it is the laxity of all.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy loosens social bonds, but it tightens natural ones. It brings relatives closer at the same time as it separates citizens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is nothing less dreamy than the citizens of a democracy [...]. Their minds willingly turn away from the ideal to direct themselves toward some visible and proximate goal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To dare declare a war, even a legitimate one, on the ideas of one's age and country, one must have in one's mind a certain violent and adventurous disposition.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What was pride in the former becomes puerile vanity and wretched pretension in the latter.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy, which destroys or obscures almost all old social conventions [...], only modifies the other [sentiments], and often gives them an energy and a gentleness they did not have.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I have never seen [...] anyone who so easily consoled himself for unfortunate events by explaining the causes that had produced them [...]. When he had finished painting the bleakest picture of the state of affairs, he would conclude with a smiling and placid air.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I did not believe [...] that republican government was the best suited to the needs of France [...]. The republic was a government without counterbalance, which always promised more, but always gave less freedom than the constitutional monarchy.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In the midst of this languor of all political passions [...] a single passion remains alive in France: it is the hatred of the old regime and distrust of the old privileged classes, which represent it in the eyes of the people.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The republic was [...] quite difficult to overthrow. The hatred for it was a soft hatred, like all the passions then felt by the country. Besides, its government was condemned without any other being loved.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[His supporters] chose him, in fact, not for his value, but for his presumed mediocrity. They thought they had found in him an instrument they could use at their discretion [...]. In this they were very gravely mistaken.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
His dissimulation [...] was singularly aided by the immobility of his features and the blankness of his gaze: for his eyes were dull and opaque, like those thick panes of glass [...] which let in light, but through which one sees nothing.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
His intelligence was incoherent, confused, full of great, ill-assorted thoughts [...] but never certain and always ready to place a bizarre idea next to a sound one.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
One can say [...] that it was his madness more than his reason that, thanks to circumstances, created his success and his strength: for the world is a strange theater. There are moments in it when the worst plays are the ones that succeed best.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
He desired, moreover, above all, to find devotion to his person and his cause [...]. Merit bothered him if it was at all independent. He needed believers in his star and vulgar worshipers of his fortune.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Official correspondence and police reports [...] are only fit to give exaggerated and incomplete notions, always false, when one wants to judge or foresee the great movements of parties.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Within its walls, one breathed the air of civil war. The words there were brief, the gestures violent, the language excessive [...]. It was a duel in a barrel.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
After having half-drawn the sword, they seemed to want to sheathe it again; but it was too late, the signal had been seen by their friends outside, and henceforth, they no longer led, they were led.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I will not serve anything else, do you understand! [...] Between you and us [...] it is a matter of who will best serve the republic. Well then! my sorrow is that you serve it very badly.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Thus ended the second June insurrection [...]. In June 1848, the leaders were missing for the army; in June 1849, the army was missing for the leaders.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
If ever [my opponents] are the masters and they leave me with only my head, I shall consider myself satisfied and ready to declare that their virtue has surpassed my expectations.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
General well-being favors the stability of all governments, but particularly of democratic government, which rests on the dispositions of the greatest number [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When the people govern, it is necessary for them to be happy, so that they do not overturn the State. Misery produces in them what ambition does in kings.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among [the Americans], the desire for well-being has become a restless and ardent passion that grows as it is satisfied.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Often the Americans call a laudable industry what we name the love of gain, and they see a certain faintness of heart in what we consider the moderation of desires.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The passions that most deeply agitate the Americans are commercial passions and not political passions, or rather, they carry the habits of business into politics.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Let the human mind follow its tendency, and it will regulate political society and the divine city in a uniform manner; it will seek [...] to harmonize the earth with the heavens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
While the European seeks to escape his domestic sorrows by disturbing society, the American draws from his home the love of order, which he then carries into the affairs of the State.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Religion, which in America never interferes directly with the government of society, must therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is despotism that can do without faith, but not freedom.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond is not tightened?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Unbelief is an accident; faith alone is the permanent state of humanity.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
By uniting with different political powers, religion can therefore only contract a burdensome alliance. It does not need their help to live, and by serving them it can die.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I am convinced that the most fortunate situation and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Today, when the individual is disappearing more and more into the crowd [...], who can say where the demands of power and the compliances of weakness will stop?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The provided text is a table of contents and contains no passages to extract. The following quotes are famous excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville that match your request.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom [...]. But they have a passionate, insatiable, eternal, and invincible passion for equality.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[Power] would resemble paternal authority if [...] its object was to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
They want equality in freedom, and if they cannot obtain that, they still want equality in slavery.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
In politics, what is most difficult to appreciate and to understand is what is happening before our very eyes.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Life is neither a pleasure nor a pain; it is a serious business which we are charged with, and which we must conduct and finish to our honor.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Within these limits, the writer is free; but woe to him if he dares to step out of it.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
There is nothing more fruitful in wonders than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of liberty.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows [...].
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
What corrupts men is not the use of power [...], it is the use of a power they consider illegitimate.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
From time to time, the American steals himself away, as it were, and [...] tearing himself away for a moment from the petty passions that agitate his life [...], he suddenly enters an ideal world where everything is great, pure, and eternal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Americans show by their practice that they feel the full necessity of moralizing democracy through religion.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The entire art of the legislator is to discern well in advance these natural tendencies of human societies, in order to know where it is necessary to aid the citizens' effort, and where it would be more necessary to slow it down.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
While man delights in this [...] pursuit of well-being, it is to be feared that he may finally lose the use of his most sublime faculties, and that in wanting to improve everything around him, he may finally degrade himself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The legislators of democracies [...] must apply themselves relentlessly to lifting up souls and keeping them turned towards heaven.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Materialism is in all nations a dangerous malady of the human spirit; but it is particularly to be feared among a democratic people [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy favors the taste for material pleasures. This taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that everything is but matter; and materialism [...] completes the process of dragging them [...]. Such is the fatal circle.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When any religion has taken deep root within a democracy, beware of shaking it; but rather preserve it with care as the most precious heritage of aristocratic centuries.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If a democracy absolutely had to make a choice [...], I would judge that its citizens risk less brutalization by thinking their soul will pass into the body of a pig than by believing it is nothing.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The belief in an immaterial and immortal principle [...] is so necessary to the greatness of man that it still produces beautiful effects even when not joined with the opinion of rewards and punishments [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The human heart is vaster than one supposes; it can contain at once a taste for the goods of the earth and the love of those of heaven; sometimes it seems to give itself madly to one of the two, but it is never long without thinking of the other.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The instinct and taste of humankind sustain [spiritualism]; they often save it in spite of men themselves, and keep afloat the names of those who attach themselves to it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not believe in the prosperity any more than in the duration of official philosophies, and as for state religions, I have always thought that they always sooner or later become fatal to the Church.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I am so convinced that Christianity must at all costs be maintained within new democracies, that I would rather chain priests in the sanctuary than let them leave it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I believe that the only effective means that governments can use to honor the dogma of the immortality of the soul is to act every day as if they themselves believed in it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The June insurrection was the most singular [...] for the insurgents fought without a war cry, without leaders, without flags, and yet with a marvelous coordination and a military experience that astonished the oldest officers.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[The insurrection] did not aim to change the form of government, but to alter the order of society. It was not [...] a political struggle [...] but a class struggle, a kind of servile war.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It is this mixture of greedy desires and false theories that made this insurrection so formidable after having given birth to it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
This obscure and erroneous notion of rights, mingling with brute force, gave it an energy, a tenacity, and a power it would never have had on its own.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The people of Paris need good weather to fight, and they fear the rain more than grapeshot.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
There is nothing more miserable than the sight of an assembly in a moment of crisis, when the government itself is lacking. It resembles a man [...] who struggles childishly amidst the powerlessness of his limbs.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The spirit of insurrection circulated [...] like blood in a single body; it had penetrated our houses, around, above, below us. It was like an atmosphere of civil war enveloping all of Paris.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
We would have perished, had we not been so close to perishing.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
If the revolt had been less radical [...], it is probable that most of the bourgeois would have stayed in their homes [...]. But the insurrection was of such a nature that any transaction with it seemed immediately impossible.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It is common for insurrections [...] to begin without a leader; but they always end up finding one. This one ended without having found any.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The greedy, blind, and coarse passions [...] are almost as formidable to those who sympathize with them without fully abandoning themselves to them as to those who condemn and fight them.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In times of violent crises, even actions that have no relation to politics take on a peculiar character of disorder and anger, [...] a very sure sign of the general state of minds.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Fools show their fear nakedly and coarsely, but others know how to cover it with such a fine veil [...] of plausible little lies that there is some pleasure in observing this ingenious work of the intellect.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Never were people so glad to be rid of their liberty and their government.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Assemblies are like children, idleness rarely fails to make them say or do many foolish things.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
All these officials [...] often resemble those of today [...]; but they differ profoundly in their position [...] they had no idea of leaving [their posts] nor any hope of rising higher: which was enough to make them something quite different from what we know today.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It is this habit which, extending and strengthening more and more, eventually leads to the tax system being regarded as an odious and deceitful tyrant, not the agent of all, but the common enemy.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
[Cities] are made to contract debts, and then they are authorized to establish [...] temporary taxes to free themselves. To which it must be added that, later, these temporary taxes are made permanent [...], and then the government takes its share.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Nothing better shows the degradation into which local liberties had fallen than this eternal upheaval of their laws, to which no one seems to pay attention. This mobility alone would have been enough to destroy in advance [...] all local patriotism.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
When the administration of a city is given [...] to certain men, and these men are granted [...] privileges that place them personally beyond the reach of the consequences their administration may have [...], administrative oversight may appear to be a necessity.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The middle class was as eager for positions then and as little sought the field of its activity outside of public functions as it does today. The only difference was [...] that then one bought the petty importance that positions give, and that today applicants ask for it to be given to them for free as an act of charity.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The parish assembly is only an administrative inquiry [...], it never leads to a vote, [...] it contains only individual opinions, and in no way binds the will of the government.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It is in the colonies that one can best judge the physiognomy of the government of the metropole, because it is there that ordinarily all the traits that characterize it are magnified and become more visible.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
[The administration is] almost as numerous as the population, preponderant, acting, regulating, constraining, wanting to foresee everything, taking charge of everything, always more aware of the interests of the administered than he is himself, ceaselessly active and sterile.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Only a government [...] that always dealt with men individually [...] could have maintained the ridiculous and senseless inequality [...]; the slightest contact with self-government would have profoundly modified and rapidly transformed or destroyed it.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Provincial liberties can subsist for some time without national liberty [...]; but it is unreasonable to believe that one can, at will, create local liberties, or even maintain them for long, when general liberty is suppressed.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The Revolution, having broken these social bonds without establishing political bonds in their place, prepared both equality and servitude at the same time.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
So wrong it is to confuse independence with liberty. There is nothing less independent than a free citizen.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
Today, [when a government has spendthrift passions], loans are made whose immediate effect is almost unnoticed, and whose final result will only be felt by the next generation.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
It was less [...] human reason that [the philosophers] adored than their own reason. Never has less confidence been shown than by them in common wisdom. [...] Submission [...] to the will of the majority was as foreign to them as submission to divine will.
1856
Source: The Old Regime and the Revolution
The most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of the Blacks on their soil.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is an evil which enters the world furtively: [...] it then feeds on itself, spreads without effort, and grows naturally with the society that has received it: this evil is slavery.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The memory of slavery dishonors the race, and the race perpetuates the memory of slavery.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The law can destroy servitude, but only God can make its trace disappear.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The moderns, after having abolished slavery, have [...] to destroy three prejudices far more elusive and tenacious than it: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the inequality created by laws alone is so difficult to uproot, how can one destroy that which seems [...] to have its immutable foundations in nature itself?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The prejudice of race seems to me stronger in the States that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] the prejudice which repels the Negroes seems to grow in proportion as the Negroes cease to be slaves, and inequality is engraved in the customs as it is erased from the laws.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is not for the benefit of the Negroes, but for that of the whites, that slavery is destroyed in the United States.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The influence of slavery extends [...] into the very soul of the master, and gives a particular direction to his ideas and tastes.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Today, only the North has ships, manufactories, railroads, and canals.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Negroes can remain slaves for a long time without complaining; but once they have entered the ranks of free men, they will soon be indignant at being deprived of almost all the rights of citizens [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To give a man freedom and leave him in misery and ignominy, what is that but to provide a future leader for a slave revolt?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In Antiquity, they sought to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; in our day, they have undertaken to take away his desire to do so.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Slavery [...] in the midst of the democratic freedom and enlightenment of our age, is not an institution that can endure. It will cease by the act of the slave or by that of the master.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The constitution [...] rests indeed on an entirely new theory, which should mark a great discovery in the political science of our time.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In America, the Union governs not states, but individual citizens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The human mind invents things more easily than words: hence the use of so many improper terms and incomplete expressions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In small nations, the eye of society penetrates everywhere; the spirit of improvement descends to the smallest details.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When tyranny is established within a small nation, it is more inconvenient than anywhere else, because, acting in a more restricted circle, it extends to everything.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Liberty, truth be told, is the natural condition of small societies.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The history of the world provides no example of a great nation that has long remained a republic, which has led some to say that it is impracticable.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I think it is very unwise for man to want to limit the possible and judge the future, he from whom the real and the present escape every day.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All the passions that are fatal to republics grow with the extent of the territory, while the virtues that support them do not increase in the same measure.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Nothing is so contrary to the well-being and liberty of men as great empires.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Strength is therefore often for nations one of the first conditions of happiness and even of existence.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Union is free and happy like a small nation, glorious and strong like a great one.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The legislator is like a man charting his course in the middle of the seas. He can [...] direct the vessel which carries him, but he cannot change its structure, create the winds, nor prevent the ocean from rising beneath his feet.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A false idea, but clear and precise, will always have more power in the world than a true but complex one.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The sovereignty of the Union is an abstract thing [...]. The sovereignty of the states is natural; it exists by itself, without effort, like the authority of the father of a family.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The social ill may be less than supposed; but none can deny that it is very great and that there is a pressing need to apply a remedy to it.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To judge a new system with full knowledge of the facts, it is necessary for the entire generation of those who were [...] under the previous one to have disappeared.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
One may [...] wonder if [a system] that succeeds with one people does not find insurmountable obstacles in the character and natural dispositions of another.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The truth is that any considerable change [...] is a difficult operation that brings with it [...] some uncertainties. This is a necessary evil, but one that is not irremediable.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
A [...] reform can only be done gradually: if the change is gradual [...], the experience gained in the first stages will teach what to add or remove in the others.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It would seem we are applying the harshest regime to the least guilty, and reserving the mildest for the most criminal: which is [...] contrary to all principles of natural equity.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Everything is connected [...] in a penal system. Reason and public interest indicate that when one mode of sanction is made more severe, the severity must be felt at once on all levels of the penal scale.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Any profound change in the penal code [is] a danger that should only be risked when it is necessary to do so.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is [...] a very considerable and very dangerous innovation to create a particular class of convicts, and to establish for them a special punishment.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The guiding principle of criminal law is that the legislator should only leave to the discretion of the courts what it is impossible for the legislator to decide.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To modify the regimen without touching the duration is to wish the penal law to be either cruel or powerless.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It [...] is contrary to the idea of regular justice to leave to the administration [...] the task of regulating the penal consequences of the court's judgments.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The right of pardon, [...] in a well-ordered society, cannot be used as a routine means of administration.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The legislator's duty is to make inequalities as rare [...] as possible. But to flatter oneself that one can make them disappear completely is to believe oneself stronger than the very necessity of things.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
it was still better to fail in logic than to risk failing in humanity.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
This is to understand, in a very crude and tyrannical form, the equality that democracy brings about.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no social state or law that can make men so similar that education, fortune, and tastes do not create some difference between them [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Men] will establish, alongside the great political society, small private societies, bound together by the similarity of their conditions, habits, and customs.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Each of them willingly recognizes all his fellow citizens as his equals, but he never receives more than a very small number of them among his friends or guests.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the circle of public society expands, one must expect the sphere of private relations to shrink.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Instead of imagining that the citizens of new societies will end up living in common, I fear that they will eventually form nothing but very small cliques.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When neither law nor custom is responsible for establishing frequent relations [...], the accidental resemblance of opinions and inclinations decides it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, [...] a multitude of artificial and arbitrary classifications are created, by which each person seeks to set himself apart, for fear of being unwillingly swept into the crowd.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One can change human institutions, but not man himself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whatever the general effort of a society to make citizens equal and similar, the particular pride of individuals will always seek to escape the level.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocracies, men are separated from one another by high, immovable barriers; in democracies, they are divided by a multitude of tiny, almost invisible threads.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whatever the progress of equality, a great number of small private associations will always be formed among democratic peoples in the midst of the great political society.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among most European peoples, when a man begins to feel his strength and expand his desires, the first idea that comes to his mind is to obtain a public office.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When public offices are few [...] and, on the other hand, industrial careers are numerous and productive, it is towards industry and not towards administration that the new and impatient desires born daily of equality are directed.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] citizens, despairing of improving their lot by themselves, rush tumultuously towards the head of state and ask for his help.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To make oneself more comfortable at the expense of the public treasury seems to them [...] the easiest and most open way for all to escape a condition that no longer suffices them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The quest for public office becomes the most pursued of all industries.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This universal and immoderate desire for public office [...] destroys, in each citizen, the spirit of independence, and spreads throughout the body of the nation a venal and servile disposition [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
An industry of this kind creates only unproductive activity and stirs up the country without making it fruitful.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The government which encourages such a tendency risks its tranquility and even puts its very life in great peril.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What may appear for a certain period to be a cause of strength, certainly becomes in the long run a great source of trouble and weakness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among democratic peoples [...], the number of the ambitious has no limits; it grows ceaselessly, by a gradual and irresistible movement, as conditions become more equal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When ambition has no other outlet than administration alone, the government necessarily ends up facing permanent opposition.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The government's task] is to satisfy with limited means desires that multiply without limit.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Of all the peoples in the world, the most difficult to contain and to direct is a nation of office-seekers.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The princes of our time, who strive to draw to themselves alone all the new desires that equality arouses [...] will end up regretting having engaged in such an enterprise.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It would have been more honest and safer to teach each of their subjects the art of being self-sufficient.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A sort of methodical order [...] has presided over the separation of land and water [...]. A simple and majestic arrangement reveals itself even in the midst of the confusion of objects.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The valley watered by the Mississippi seems to have been created for it alone; it dispenses good and evil there at will, and is like its god.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Mississippi Valley is, all in all, the most magnificent dwelling that God has ever prepared for man's habitation, and yet [...] it still forms but a vast wilderness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
On this arid strip of land were born and grew the colonies [...] that were one day to become the United States of America. It is still there today that the center of power is found.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Death was hidden beneath this brilliant mantle [...] and there reigned [...] in the air of these climates I know not what enervating influence that attached man to the present and made him careless of the future.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
North America appeared under another aspect: everything there was grave, serious, solemn; one would have said that it had been created to become the domain of the intellect, as the other the dwelling of the senses.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Thus death came, in a way, to the aid of life. The one and the other were in each other's presence; they seemed to have wanted to mix and confound their works.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Indian owed nothing but to himself; his virtues, his vices, his prejudices, were his own work: he had grown up in the savage independence of his nature.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The coarseness of the common people in civilized countries comes not only from their being ignorant and poor, but from the fact that, being so, they are in daily contact with enlightened and rich men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The feeling of their inferiority and dependence irritates and humiliates them. This internal state of the soul is reproduced in their manners [...]; they are at once insolent and base.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This unfortunate effect of the contrast of conditions is not found in savage life: the Indians, while they are all ignorant and poor, are all equal and free.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Gentle and hospitable in peace, ruthless in war [...], the Indian would expose himself to starvation to help the stranger who knocked at his cabin door in the evening.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Indian knew how to live without needs, to suffer without complaining, and to die singing.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Strange thing! There are peoples who have so completely disappeared from the earth that the very memory of their name has been erased; [...] their glory has vanished like an echoless sound.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Thus, of all man's works, the most durable is still that which best retraces his nothingness and his miseries!
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One must have seen love thus spurred on by fear to know with what excess of idolatry men can love.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The transport of favor shown to him then could be compared to nothing, except, perhaps, the excess of injustice that was soon used against him.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
He thus saw for himself almost as much damage and peril in winning as in being vanquished.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I do not think it was possible for him [...] to keep power for long; I believe the only chance left for him was to lose it with glory, by saving the country.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have seen a host of men disturb the country to aggrandize themselves: it is the common perversity.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have never known a mind less sincere, nor one that had a more complete contempt for the truth. [...] he did not honor it enough to bother with it in any way.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In speaking or writing, he leaves the truth and returns to it without noticing; solely preoccupied with a certain effect he wants to produce at that moment.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In France, political begging exists under all regimes; it increases with the very revolutions that are made against it [...].
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
...in such a way as to give the country enough security to be blessed for it, but not enough to be forgotten.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Never did the parties better display that sort of pedantic hypocrisy which makes them hide interests behind ideas.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
...the need of the moment forced each party to take shelter behind theories that were foreign or even opposed to it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[He was] incapable of having any of his adversaries' heads cut off, except perhaps out of historical reminiscence or out of condescension to his friends.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[Parties] only ever think of the pleasure that the words of their great orator bring them, and never of the dangerous excitement it will give their adversaries.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
How, indeed, can one foresee where a constantly leaping imagination, not limited by reason or virtue, may go?
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I held him capable of anything, except acting cowardly or speaking in a vulgar way.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The revolution [...], by striking the upper classes, had made them feel, if not the truth, at least the social utility of belief.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The electoral system one adopts only has a great influence on the kind of ordinary men who make up the Assembly and form the basis of any political body.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The Assembly [...] was great as long as it had to fight; it only became wretched after the victory and when it felt itself collapsing from the very effect [...] of that victory.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I had [...] no cause to defend except that of liberty and human dignity.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
To defeat demagoguery with democracy, that was my sole aim.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
One must have seen love thus spurred on by fear to know with what an excess of idolatry men can love.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have seen a crowd of men disturb the country to aggrandize themselves: that is common perversity; but [others] have always seemed ready to turn the world upside down for their own amusement.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have never known a mind [...] with a more complete contempt for the truth. In speaking or writing, he leaves truth and returns to it without noticing, solely preoccupied with a certain effect he wants to produce.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Never have parties better shown that sort of pedantic hypocrisy which makes them hide interests behind ideas.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[Parties] only ever think of the pleasure that the speech of their great orator gives them and never of the dangerous excitement it will give to their adversaries.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have always thought that in revolutions [...] madmen, not those to whom we give the name by courtesy, but the real ones, have played a very considerable political role.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Parties never know one another: they approach, they press, they seize one another, but they do not see one another.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[The insurrection] was not [...] a political struggle, but a class struggle, a kind of servile war.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
This obscure and erroneous notion of rights, mingling with brute force, gave the latter an energy, tenacity, and power it would never have had alone.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Fools grossly show their fear naked, but [others] know how to cover it with a veil so fine [...] of plausible little lies that there is some pleasure in contemplating this ingenious work of the intellect.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In America, a woman's independence is lost without return amidst the bonds of matrimony.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the young girl is less constrained there than anywhere else, the wife submits to stricter obligations.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Religious peoples and industrial nations have a particularly serious idea of marriage.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] there reigns in the United States an inexorable public opinion, which carefully confines the woman to the small circle of domestic interests and duties [...]
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is in the use of independence that she has drawn the courage to undergo its sacrifice without struggle or murmur when the time has come to impose it upon herself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The American woman [...] never falls into the bonds of marriage as into a trap set for her simplicity and her ignorance. [...] She courageously bears her new condition, because she has chosen it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
For the woman, the sources of happiness are in the conjugal home. Seeing in advance [...] the only path that can lead to domestic felicity, she enters it from her first steps [...]
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no country in the world where private fortunes are more unstable than in the United States.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The women of America bear these revolutions with a tranquil and indomitable energy. One would say that their desires contract with their fortune, as easily as they expand.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As we draw near, traces of destruction announce to us the presence of civilized man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The pioneer] belongs to that restless, reasoning, and adventurous race, who does coldly what the ardor of passion alone explains [...]
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] in exercising hospitality, [the pioneer] seems to submit to a painful necessity of his lot: he sees it as a duty that his position imposes on him, not a pleasure.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One sees spread over her entire countenance a religious resignation, a profound peace of the passions, and [...] a natural and tranquil firmness that confronts all the evils of life without fearing or defying them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Seeing their strength and her weakness, one would say that she has exhausted herself in giving them life, and that she does not regret what they have cost her.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This dwelling forms, by itself, a small world; it is the ark of civilization lost in the midst of an ocean of foliage.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The republic was [...] difficult to maintain, for most of those who loved it were incapable or unworthy of leading it, and those who were fit to lead it detested it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The hatred felt for it was a soft hatred, like all the passions then felt by the country.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The world is a strange theatre. There are moments in it when the worst plays are the most successful.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
While he had a kind of abstract adoration for the people, he had very little taste for liberty.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The characteristic and fundamental trait of his mind, in political matters, was hatred and contempt for assemblies.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
He needed believers in his star and vulgar worshippers of his fortune.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Official correspondence and police reports [...] are only fit to give [...] always false notions, when one wants to judge or foresee the great movements of parties.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
People were touching, while detesting each other; they were pressed against one another, despite their hatreds [...]. It was a duel in a barrel.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
After half-drawing the sword, they seemed to want to sheathe it; but it was too late [...], henceforth, they no longer led, they were led.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It is after a great success that one usually encounters the most dangerous chances of ruin: [...] after the victory, one begins to have to deal with oneself.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Good God! Save me from my friends; I will guard myself from my adversaries.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The only way left, after such a violent revolution, to save liberty was to restrain it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
One can never satisfy men by concerning oneself only with their general good without taking into account their vanity and their private interests.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It is with men's vanity that one can conduct the most advantageous business, for one often obtains very substantial things from it, while giving very little substance in return.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Affairs do not always become more difficult as they become larger [...]. It often even happens that they take on a simpler aspect as their consequences may be more extensive and more formidable.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
They love change, but they dread revolutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When conditions are equal, each person willingly isolates themself and forgets the public.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic societies, there are hardly any but small minorities who desire revolutions; but minorities can sometimes bring them about.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men are in constant motion; the human spirit seems almost stationary.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What struck me [...] is the difficulty one experiences in disabusing the majority of an idea it has conceived [...]. Experience alone can achieve it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One hardly takes the word of one's fellow or one's equal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is very difficult to get the men who live in democracies to listen, if you do not speak to them of themselves.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The fire they put into business prevents them from becoming inflamed with ideas.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among [democratic peoples], public favor seems as necessary as the air we breathe, and to be in disagreement with the mass is, so to speak, not to live.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whenever conditions are equal, general opinion weighs immensely upon the mind of each individual; it envelops, directs, and oppresses him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The majority has no need to constrain him; it convinces him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What I fear most for the generations to come is not revolutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Of all armies, those which most ardently desire war are democratic armies, and of all peoples, those which most love peace are democratic peoples.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All those who seek to destroy liberty within a democratic nation must know that the surest and shortest means to succeed is war.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality produces two tendencies: one leads men to independence and can drive them to anarchy; the other leads them by a longer, more secret, but surer path to servitude.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy [...] introduces the industrial spirit into literature.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In aristocracies, readers are few and hard to please; in democracies [...] their number is prodigious.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic nations, a writer may hope to obtain a mediocre fame and a great fortune cheaply.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
For this, it is not necessary that he be admired, it is enough that he be liked.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The ever-increasing crowd of readers and their constant need for novelty ensure the sale of a book they hardly value.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic times the public often treats authors as kings do their courtiers; it enriches and despises them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democratic literatures always teem with authors who see in letters nothing but a trade [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] for the few great writers one sees, there are thousands of sellers of ideas.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I have never known what it is to want to overthrow a government that I have served.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[...] the old aristocratic society had disappeared forever, and all that remained for the men of our time was to organize, progressively and prudently, the new democratic society upon its ruins.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is necessary [...] to arrive little by little at the government of the country by the country.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I have not confined my opinions to obscure words that can be explained, retracted, or denied according to the needs of the moment, but in writings that remain and commit me.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I do want constant progress, it is true, but I want it to be gradual.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I love liberty, not demagoguery.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I know that [my country] needs both independence and peace at the same time, and that it must be spared any new revolution.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I do not like obscurity. I love the light and I want to live in it.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I have always thought that for a man destined for public life, true dignity consists not in evading questions, but in answering them.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The deputy must, in a way, live in the presence of the electorate: he must explain his votes [...], or at least make them known through direct reports which, to be useful and appear sincere, must be frequent.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Anonymous letters [...] published on election day, so that there is no time to respond to them, [...] are cowardly and disloyal maneuvers that honest people of all parties condemn.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I am a new man who brings to the new circumstances that arise nothing but a free spirit, an ardent and sincere love for representative government, and for the dignity of the country.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I am firmly attached to principles, but I am not tied to a party.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
I am [...] in complete and entire independence from the government; I am not a ministerial candidate and I do not wish to be one.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
No societies have yet been seen where conditions were so equal that there were no rich or poor; and, consequently, no masters and servants.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy does not prevent [certain] classes of men from existing; but it changes their spirit and modifies their relations.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Because a class is low, one must not believe that all those who are part of it are base of heart. That would be a great mistake.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The leader], in aristocracies, often exercises, even without his knowledge, a prodigious sway over the opinions, habits, and customs of those who obey him [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In an aristocracy, a long community of memories binds men together [...]; whereas in democracies, where they are almost alike, they always remain strangers to one another.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality of conditions makes [...] new beings, and establishes new relations between them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Men] are not inferior to one another; they only become so momentarily through the effect of the contract.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Public opinion [...] creates between [men] a kind of imaginary equality, despite the real inequality of their conditions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In a democracy, [men] are without contempt and without anger, and they find themselves neither humble nor proud when looking at each other.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among democratic peoples, [men] are very close; their bodies touch constantly; their souls do not mingle.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What matters most to find among men is not a certain order, but order itself.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[In a time of transition,] obedience loses its morality in the eyes of the one who obeys; [...] he submits to it as a degrading and useful fact.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They consent to serve, and they are ashamed to obey; they love the advantages of servitude, but not the master.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[In a revolutionary period,] the lines that divide authority from tyranny, liberty from license, right from fact, seem [...] entangled and confused [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Such a state is not democratic, but revolutionary.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
America is the country in the world where the most has been made of association, and where this powerful means of action has been applied to a greater diversity of objects.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to combat the evils and difficulties of life; he casts but a defiant and uneasy glance upon the social authority [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is nothing which human will despairs of achieving by the free action of the collective power of individuals.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When an opinion is represented by an association, it is obliged to take a clearer and more precise form. It counts its partisans and engages them in its cause.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among the moderns, the independence of the press is the capital, and so to speak, constitutive element of freedom. A people that wants to remain free therefore has the right to demand that it be respected at any cost.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In our time, freedom of association has become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The omnipotence of the majority seems to me such a great peril for the American republics, that the dangerous means used to limit it still seems to me a good thing.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no country where associations are more necessary, to prevent the despotism of parties [...], than those where the social state is democratic.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In countries where such associations do not exist, [...] I no longer perceive any dam against any sort of tyranny, and a great people can be oppressed with impunity by a handful of factionists or by one man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Unlimited freedom of association in political matters [...] is, of all freedoms, the last that a people can bear. If it does not make it fall into anarchy, it brings it, so to speak, to the brink of it at every moment.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America, there are factionists, but no conspirators.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
After the freedom to act alone, the most natural to man is that of combining his efforts with the efforts of his fellow men and of acting in common.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The first idea that presents itself to the mind of a party [...] is the idea of violence: the idea of persuasion comes only later; it is born of experience.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It sometimes happens that extreme freedom corrects the abuses of freedom, and that extreme democracy prevents the dangers of democracy.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
He who consents to obey slavishly [...] some of his fellow men, who gives up his will to them and submits even his thought to them, how can he claim that he wants to be free?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Why democratic peoples show a more ardent and enduring love for equality than for liberty.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Of individualism in democratic countries.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How the Americans combat individualism with the doctrine of self-interest properly understood.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Why Americans are so restless in the midst of their prosperity.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How the excessive love of well-being can be detrimental to well-being.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How, in times of equality and doubt, it is important to set the goal of human actions further off.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How aristocracy might arise from industry.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How mores are softened as conditions are equalized.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How the aspect of society [...] is at once turbulent and monotonous.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Why one finds so many ambitious men in the United States and so few great ambitions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Why great revolutions will become rare.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Why democratic peoples naturally desire peace, and democratic armies naturally desire war.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality naturally gives men the taste for free institutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What kind of despotism democratic nations have to fear.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
How equality suggests to the Americans the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When an artisan devotes himself incessantly and exclusively to the fabrication of a single object, he loses [...] the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It can be said that in him, the man is degraded as the workman is perfected.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making pinheads?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In a word, he no longer belongs to himself, but to the profession he has chosen.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the midst of universal movement, [an industrial theory] has rendered him immobile.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the principle of the division of labor receives a more complete application, the worker becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The art progresses, the artisan regresses.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
While the worker increasingly brings his intelligence to bear on the study of a single detail, the master surveys a broader whole each day...
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The one increasingly resembles the administrator of a vast empire, and the other a brute.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The master and the worker have [...] nothing in common [...]. They are connected only like the two end links of a long chain.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the mass of the nation turns to democracy, the particular class engaged in industry becomes more aristocratic.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It seems we see aristocracy emerge by a natural effort from the very bosom of democracy.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is no real bond between the poor and the rich. They are not permanently fixed near one another; at every moment, interest brings them together and separates them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The manufacturer asks of the worker nothing but his labor, and the worker expects from him nothing but his wage.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The manufacturing aristocracy [...], after having impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in times of crisis to public charity to feed them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If ever the permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy re-enter the world, it can be predicted that they will enter through this gate.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Almost all the revolutions that have changed the face of nations have been made to consolidate or to destroy inequality.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If you can establish a state of society in which everyone has something to keep, and little to take, you will have done much for the peace of the world.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men who live in comfort [...] set an immense price upon their property. As they are still very close to poverty, they see its rigors up close, and they dread them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic societies, the majority of citizens do not see clearly what they could gain from a revolution, and they feel at every moment [...] what they could lose by it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Commerce is naturally the enemy of all violent passions. [...] It therefore disposes men to liberty, but it turns them away from revolutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Violent political passions have little hold on men who have [...] attached their whole soul to the pursuit of well-being. The ardor they apply to small matters calms them regarding great ones.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One does not struggle successfully against the spirit of one's age and country.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They love change, but they dread revolutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic societies, there are scarcely any but small minorities who desire revolutions; but minorities can sometimes make them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whenever conditions are equal, public opinion exerts immense weight on the mind of each individual; it envelops, directs, and oppresses him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As all men more and more resemble one another, each feels himself weaker and weaker in the face of all. [...] he is very close to acknowledging he is wrong, when the greatest number affirms it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is very difficult to be heard by men who live in democracies, when one does not speak to them about themselves.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What I fear most for the generations to come is not revolutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I tremble [...] lest they finally allow themselves to be so possessed by a craven love of present enjoyments, that the interest in their own future and that of their descendants disappears.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is believed that new societies will change their face daily, and I am afraid that they will end up being too invariably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same mores [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Everything that can help to better know an illustrious man, his life, his works, is a text worthy of study and meditation.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
What booklet [from a great mind], however small, does not contain some bright light, some general and fertile idea?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
What is striking about [certain] works is the practical and current utility that most of them can have for contemporaries.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is in the nature of democracy to forget quickly: men change, traditions are lost; we must constantly restart studies and experiments already made.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
How to reconcile the severe mode of repression that public security demands with the feelings of humanity that this repression might wound?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
It is recognized that inmates, if mixed together indiscriminately, corrupt one another and thus become [...] more dangerous enemies of public order.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The rules that govern a good prison system [...] are not arbitrary; [...] they have something fixed and permanent that does not change.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
A declaration of impotence would be a great national sorrow and a great national humiliation.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
What should the administration do in [a great] work? What should it let be done? What should it not do?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
How to bring or attract [...] new populations without entering into [...] conflict with the old society that has been established there for centuries?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
Where is the point between firmness united with justice [...] and impolitic generosity that [...] would put weapons in the hands [of opponents]?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To what extent should the conqueror use his force so as not to be an oppressor? And his indulgence, so as not to lose his prestige and his own dignity?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
At what point does power become tyranny, and its condescension weakness in the eyes of [...] peoples who will cease to be subject to it the day they cease to fear it?
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[He] announced [...], amidst general disbelief, that a great revolution was imminent.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The first and most intense of the passions born of equality of conditions [...] is the love of that same equality.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One can imagine an extreme point where liberty and equality touch and merge.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men will be perfectly free, because they will all be entirely equal; and they will all be perfectly equal, because they will be entirely free.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The taste that men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two distinct things, and [...] among democratic peoples, they are two unequal things.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The particular and dominant fact that singles out these centuries is the equality of conditions; the principal passion that stirs men in such times is the love of this equality.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To lose political liberty, it is enough not to hold on to it, and it slips away.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The evils which liberty sometimes brings are immediate; they are visible to all [...]. The evils which extreme equality may produce are disclosed only by degrees.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The goods that liberty provides reveal themselves only in the long run, and it is always easy to fail to recognize the cause that gives them birth.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Political liberty gives, from time to time, to a certain number of citizens, sublime pleasures. Equality provides each day a multitude of small enjoyments for every man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men cannot enjoy political liberty without purchasing it by some sacrifices [...]. But the pleasures that equality provides offer themselves.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men then rush toward equality as if it were a conquest, and they cling to it as to a precious good they are afraid of having snatched away.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Do not show them the liberty that is escaping from their hands, while they are looking elsewhere; they are blind, or rather they perceive in the whole universe only one good worthy of envy.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for liberty [...]. But they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion for equality.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They want equality in liberty, and if they cannot obtain it, they still want it in slavery.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They will suffer poverty, servitude, barbarism, but they will not suffer aristocracy.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
General ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the human mind undertook to examine [...] all the particular cases that strike it, it would soon be lost in the midst of the immensity of details and would see nothing.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
General ideas [...] allow the human mind to make rapid judgments on a great number of objects at once; but [...] they never provide anything but incomplete notions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As societies grow older, they acquire knowledge of new facts and every day, almost unconsciously, seize upon some particular truths.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One cannot see a multitude of particular facts separately without finally discovering the common bond that unites them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I learn, every morning upon waking, that some general and eternal law has just been discovered of which I had never heard until then.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When conditions are very unequal and [...] permanent, individuals become so dissimilar that one would say there are as many distinct humanities as there are classes.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The man who lives in democratic countries finds [...] near him, only beings who are more or less alike. All truths applicable to himself seem to him equally applicable to his fellow men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It was necessary for Jesus Christ to come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species were naturally similar and equal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In centuries of equality, all men are independent of one another, isolated and weak [...]. Humanity then seems always to advance of its own accord.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When I escape the sway of example to seek, by the sole effort of my reason, the path to follow, I am inclined to draw the reasons for my opinions from the very nature of man.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men who live in centuries of equality have a great deal of curiosity and little leisure; their life is so practical, so complicated, so agitated [...] that they are left with but little time for thought.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men in democratic centuries love general ideas because they exempt them from studying particular cases.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One of the distinctive characteristics of democratic centuries is the taste all men feel for easy success and present enjoyment.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If aristocratic nations do not make enough use of general ideas [...], it happens, on the contrary, that democratic peoples are always ready to abuse these kinds of ideas.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the rules of social hierarchy are less observed, [...] the distance in fact and opinion that separated the worker from the master is seen to decrease daily.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The worker conceives a higher idea of his rights, of his future, of himself; a new ambition, new desires fill him, new needs besiege him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the continual struggle between these two classes for wages, forces are therefore shared, and successes alternate.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is even to be believed that in the long run the interest of the workers must prevail; for the high wages they have already obtained make them daily less dependent on their masters.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The slow and progressive rise of wages is one of the general laws that govern democratic societies.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As conditions become more equal, wages rise, and as wages are higher, conditions become more equal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The aristocracy, driven from political society, has withdrawn into certain parts of the industrial world, and has established its empire there in another form.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As one must already be very rich to undertake the great industries [...], the number of those who undertake them is very small. Being few in number, they can easily league together and fix the price of labor as they please.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Once men have entered this [industrial] career, [...] they cannot leave it, because they soon contract habits [...] that render them unfit for any other labor.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The workers] generally have little enlightenment, industry, or resources; they are therefore almost at the mercy of their master.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If they refuse to work by common agreement: the master, who is a rich man, can easily wait, without ruining himself, for necessity to bring them back; but they must work every day so as not to die.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Oppression has long impoverished them, and they are easier to oppress as they become poorer. It is a vicious circle from which they cannot escape.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One should not be surprised, then, if wages, after sometimes rising suddenly, fall here permanently, while in other professions the price of labor [...] constantly increases.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This state of dependence and misery [...] is an exceptional fact contrary to all that surrounds it; but, for this very reason, it is no less serious.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is difficult, when the whole of society is in motion, to keep one class stationary, and [...] to make some people peacefully endure their needs and desires.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is common for agricultural populations to receive political impressions more slowly and to hold on to them more stubbornly than any others; they are the last to rise and the last to sit down again.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Fear, which had at first been confined to the top of society, then descended to the very bottom of the popular class, and a universal terror seized the whole country.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Property, among all those who enjoyed it, had become a kind of fraternity. [...] all considered themselves as brothers, having a common interest in defending the common inheritance.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[...] the old parties and the different classes had come together rather than merged; fear had acted upon them as a mechanical pressure might on very hard bodies [...] which separate as soon as it is relaxed.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In France, provincials have for Paris and the central power [...] feelings analogous to those the English have for their aristocracy, which they sometimes bear with impatience and often view with jealousy, but which, at heart, they love [...].
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I then saw clearly [...] that nothing is more conducive to success than not desiring it too ardently.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I drew, from this calm expectation of failure, a tranquility and clarity of mind, a respect for myself and a contempt for the follies of the time that I might not have found [...] had I been solely under the sway of the passion to succeed.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
People who are not afraid, in times of revolution, are like princes in the army; they make a great impression with very ordinary actions, because the particular position they occupy naturally sets them apart from the crowd.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
There is only one way to speak well at the rostrum, and that is to be thoroughly convinced, as you ascend it, that you are cleverer than everyone else.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I did not want banquets because I did not want a revolution [...]. The only difference I see between you and me, then, is that I knew what you were doing while you yourselves did not.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
How many of these men have I seen near me, tormented by their own virtue and falling into despair, because they saw the best part of their lives spent criticizing the vices of others without finally being able to enjoy a few of their own [...].
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[...] speeches are made to be heard and not to be read, and the only good ones are those that move the audience.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have often seen grander pictures of human baseness, but I have never seen a more perfect one.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I admire how in man, imagination is more colorful and striking than reality. I had just seen the monarchy fall [...] well! I declare, none of these great pictures had caused me [...] an emotion as poignant and profound as the one I felt [...] at the sight of my fathers' ancient home [...].
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In democratic countries and times, one must be placed at the head of the people and not put oneself there.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
There have never been free societies without morals, and [...] it is woman who creates the morals.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Everything that influences the condition of women, their habits and their opinions, is [...] of great political interest.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] she has not yet entirely left childhood, yet she already thinks for herself, speaks freely, and acts alone.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
She is taught to consider the grand spectacle of the world with a firm and tranquil eye.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The vices and perils that society presents [...], she sees them clearly, judges them without illusion, and confronts them without fear.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] she is full of confidence in her own strength, and her confidence seems to be shared by all those around her.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If she does not give herself over to evil, at least she knows it; she has pure morals rather than a chaste mind.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
She enjoys all permitted pleasures without abandoning herself to any of them, and her reason never lets go of the reins [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Her reason never lets go of the reins, though it often seems to let them float.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Within a democracy, individual independence [...] is very great, youth hasty, tastes ill-contained, custom changing, public opinion [...] uncertain or powerless.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As they could not prevent her virtue from often being in peril, they wanted her to know how to defend it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They relied more on the free effort of her will than on shaken or destroyed barriers.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Instead of keeping her in distrust of herself, they seek [...] to increase her confidence in her own strength.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Far from hiding the world's corruptions from her, they wanted her to see them from the start and to practice shunning them on her own.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A democratic education is needed to protect woman from the perils with which democratic institutions and morals surround her.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the natives move away and die, in their place comes and grows incessantly an immense people. Never had such a prodigious development been seen among nations, nor such a rapid destruction.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is not, properly speaking, the Europeans who drive out the natives [...], it is famine: a happy distinction that had escaped the ancient casuists and that modern doctors have discovered.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The social bond, long weakened, then breaks. There was already no longer a homeland for them, soon there will be no more people [...]. The nation has ceased to exist.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Their misfortunes were old, and they felt them to be irremediable.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Half-convinced, half-compelled, the Indians move away; they go to inhabit new deserts where the whites will not leave them in peace for ten years.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Civilization is the result of a long social labor that takes place in one location, and which successive generations bequeath to one another.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The natives of North America consider work not only as an evil, but as a dishonor, and their pride struggles against civilization almost as stubbornly as their laziness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Amidst the apparent diversity of human affairs, it is not impossible to find a small number of generative facts from which all others derive.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When the one who possesses material force also enjoys intellectual preeminence, it is rare for the vanquished to become civilized; he either withdraws or is destroyed.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The misfortune of the Indians is to come into contact with the most civilized, and [...] the most greedy people on the globe, [...] to find masters in their teachers, and to receive both oppression and enlightenment at the same time.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The independence he enjoyed among his equals contrasts with the servile position he occupies in a civilized society.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Nations, like men, need time to learn, whatever their intelligence and their efforts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If they remain savages, they are pushed before you [...]; if they want to become civilized, contact with men more civilized than themselves delivers them to oppression and misery. [...] they perish.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The Americans of the United States have achieved this double result with marvelous ease, peacefully, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
One could not destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This writing will be a mirror in which I will amuse myself by looking at my contemporaries and myself, and not a painting that I intend for the public.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Our history [...] should appear only as the picture of a fierce struggle between the old regime [...] and the new France led by the middle class.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
...our revolution, for there is only one, [...] which our fathers saw begin and which, in all likelihood, we shall not see end.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[The spirit of the middle class], which, mixed with that of the people or the aristocracy, can do wonders, but which, alone, will never produce anything but a government without virtue and without greatness.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Posterity, which sees only the glaring crimes and to which, ordinarily, vices escape notice, will perhaps never know to what degree the government of that time had taken on the air of an industrial company.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
In this political world, so composed and so led, what was most lacking, especially towards the end, was political life itself.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
I have spent ten years of my life in the company of very great minds, who were constantly agitated without being able to get heated, and who employed all their perspicacity to discover subjects of serious disagreement without finding any.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[The nation] was gradually becoming accustomed to seeing in the struggles of the Chambers exercises of the mind rather than serious discussions...
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The country was then divided into two zones [...] in the upper one [...] there reigned only languor, impotence, immobility, boredom; in the lower one, political life, on the contrary, was beginning to manifest itself.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
[He] was like the man who refused to believe his house had been set on fire because he had the key in his pocket.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Soon, the political struggle will be established between those who possess and those who do not possess; the great battlefield will be property.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The disorder is not in the facts, but it has entered very deeply into the minds.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
The real cause, the effective cause that makes men lose power, is that they have become unworthy of wielding it.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Do you not feel... a wind of revolution in the air? This wind, no one knows where it is born, whence it comes, nor, believe me, whom it will carry away.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
It is not the laws themselves that make the destiny of peoples; no, it is not the mechanism of laws that produces great events, [...] it is the very spirit of the government.
1893
Source: Memoirs (Tocqueville)
Among democratic peoples, individuals are very weak; but the State, which represents them all and holds them all in its hand, is very strong.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Nowhere do citizens appear smaller than in a democratic nation. Nowhere does the nation itself seem greater...
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic societies, the imagination of men is confined when they think of themselves; it expands indefinitely when they think of the State.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The same men who live modestly in cramped dwellings often aim for the gigantic when it comes to public monuments.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democracy does not only lead men to produce a multitude of petty works; it also leads them to erect a small number of very large monuments.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
But between these two extremes, there is nothing.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
A few scattered remains of very vast edifices, therefore, reveal nothing about the social state and institutions of the people who erected them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Great monuments] do not better reveal the greatness, enlightenment, or real prosperity [of a people].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Whenever any power is able to make a whole people cooperate in a single undertaking, it will succeed [...] in drawing from the combination of such great efforts something immense...
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
...without it being necessary to conclude from this that the people are very happy, very enlightened, or even very strong.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the Romans had been better acquainted with the laws of hydraulics, they would not have erected all those aqueducts that surround the ruins of their cities.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the Romans [...] had discovered the steam engine, perhaps they would not have extended to the ends of their empire those long artificial rocks called Roman roads.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
These things [the great ancient monuments] are magnificent testaments to their ignorance as well as to their greatness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The people who left no other vestiges of their passage than a few lead pipes in the earth [...] might have been more master of nature than the Romans.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The same nations have shown themselves, at different periods of their history, chaste or dissolute. The regularity or disorder of their morals thus depended on certain changing causes, and not merely on the nature of the country, which did not change.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I will not deny that in certain climates, passions [...] are particularly ardent; but I believe that this natural ardor can always be excited or restrained by the social state and political institutions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality of conditions does not by itself produce regularity of morals; but one cannot doubt that it facilitates and increases it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Nothing serves better to legitimize illegitimate love in the eyes of those who feel it, or of the crowd that contemplates it, than forced or random unions.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What makes fidelity more obligatory makes it easier.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Our fathers had resolutely concluded that in such a matter [marriage] it was very dangerous to consult one's own heart. Chance seemed to them more clear-sighted than choice.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
To dare to declare a war, even a legitimate one, on the ideas of one's own century and country, requires a certain violent and adventurous disposition, and people of this character [...] rarely achieve happiness and virtue.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
This [...] is what explains why, in the most necessary and sacred revolutions, one finds so few moderate and honest revolutionaries.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
What endangers society is not the great corruption of a few; it is the laxity of all.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All men who live in democratic times more or less contract the intellectual habits of the industrial and commercial classes; their minds take on a serious, calculating, and positive turn.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality does not destroy [...] imagination; but it limits it and only allows it to fly by skimming the ground.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is nothing less dreamy than the citizens of a democracy, and one hardly sees any who are willing to abandon themselves to those idle and solitary contemplations which produce the great agitations of the heart.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If equality of conditions is favorable to good morals, the social process which makes conditions equal is very fatal to them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
All revolutions, whatever their object or their agents, have at first produced similar effects. Even those that ended by tightening the bond of morals began by loosening it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is nothing more miserably corrupt than an aristocracy that retains its wealth while losing its power, and which, reduced to vulgar pleasures, still possesses immense leisure.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] the more or less rapid development of industry [...], penal laws, the state of morals, and especially the strengthening or decline of religious beliefs, are the main causes to which one must always turn to explain the decrease or increase of crime among a people.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
A bad prison system can increase the number of crimes in two ways: [...] It can fail to correct, or complete the corruption of, the convicts, which multiplies recidivism.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The old prisons of Europe had all been built for the purpose of intimidation and not reform. Nothing was prepared there to improve the state of the soul, but the body suffered there [...].
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The result has been that most prisons have ceased to be intimidating without becoming reformatory.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
To detain an accused person until their innocence is proven is harsh; but to force them to live, while awaiting judgment, in the midst of a population of criminals, is both unwise and cruel.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
In the current state of our prisons [...], it is the corrupt or guilty detainee who feels at ease; it is the innocent or honest detainee who feels unwell.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
[...] no human power is comparable to religion for bringing about the reform of criminals, and it is on it above all that the future of penitentiary reform rests.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The convicts submit to the new discipline; but they are not converted.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
If it is not certain that [the penitentiary system] makes the inmates better than they were, it is at least certain that it prevents them from becoming worse; and that is an immense result.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
We must recognize that there exists [...] an organized society of criminals. [...] They form a small nation within the large one. Almost all of these men have met in prison.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The great question is to know, not which is the least expensive prison system, but which is the one that best represses crime and best secures the life and property of citizens.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
An intelligent society will always believe it regains in tranquility and even in wealth what it spends usefully on its prisons.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
In these small, exceptional societies contained within prisons, evil is popular; public opinion pushes towards vice and not towards virtue, and ambition can almost never lead to doing good.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
The simplest common sense indicates that if there is a powerful means of producing a profound and salutary impression on a convict, that means is to isolate him from his companions in debauchery or crime, and to deliver him to his conscience [...].
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
If the penalty of imprisonment spares the body, it is just and desirable that it at least leaves salutary traces on the mind, thus attacking evil at its source.
1864-1866
Source: Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lévy
If despotism were to establish itself among the democratic nations [...], it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I do not fear that [democratic peoples] will meet tyrants in their leaders, but rather guardians.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who revolve on themselves without respite to procure the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Each of them, withdrawn apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others [...]. He exists only in himself and for himself alone, and [...] he no longer has a country.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Above [the citizens] an immense and tutelary power is raised, which takes upon itself alone to secure their enjoyments [...]. It is absolute, detailed, regular, provident, and mild.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[This power] seeks only [...] to keep them in perpetual childhood; it likes citizens to rejoice, provided they think only of rejoicing.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The power] wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of [the citizens'] happiness [...]; why can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Equality has prepared men for all these things; it has disposed them to endure them and often even to look on them as a benefit.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[The sovereign power] does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It finally reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Our contemporaries are ceaselessly tormented by two opposing passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
They console themselves for being under tutelage by thinking that they have chosen their own tutors.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The nature of the master matters much less to me than the fact of obedience.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is especially in details that it is dangerous to enslave men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is [...] difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of directing themselves could succeed in choosing well those who are to lead them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In centuries of faith, the final goal of life is placed after life.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Religious peoples have often accomplished such lasting things. [...] by concerning themselves with the other world, they had found the great secret of succeeding in this one.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Religions instill the general habit of behaving with a view to the future. [...] This is one of their greatest political aspects.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As the light of faith grows dim, men's vision narrows, and [...] the object of human action seems closer.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As soon as they have lost the practice of placing their principal hopes in the long term, [men] are naturally inclined to want to realize their slightest desires without delay.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In centuries of unbelief, it is [...] to be feared that men will constantly give themselves over to the daily chance of their desires.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] renouncing entirely what can only be acquired through long effort, [men] build nothing great, peaceful, or lasting.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of fate, the present looms large; it hides the future, which fades away, and men wish to think only of tomorrow.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Where irreligion and democracy meet, philosophers and rulers must strive [...] to push back the object of human actions in the eyes of men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among democratic peoples [...], it is only by resisting a thousand small, particular passions every day that one can satisfy the general passion for happiness.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is important that those who lead nations conduct themselves with a view to the future. But this is even more necessary in democratic and unbelieving centuries.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Rulers] must above all strive to banish chance from the political world as much as possible.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is nothing more pernicious than [sudden and undeserved elevation] offered to the eyes of a democratic people. [It] finishes by precipitating its heart down a slope where everything pulls it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is to be desired that each step forward appear to be the fruit of an effort, [...] that there are no grandeurs too easily won, and that ambition is forced to fix its gaze on the goal for a long time before reaching it.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] great successes are found at the end of long desires, and one obtains nothing lasting except that which is acquired with difficulty.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Men who live in democratic countries [...] want to mix enjoyments with their joy.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The inhabitants of democracies do not like to feel themselves [...] violently pulled out of themselves, and it is always with regret that they lose sight of themselves.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I thought the English were the most serious nation on earth, but I have seen the Americans and I have changed my mind.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democratic countries, the poor man himself has a high idea of his personal worth. He contemplates himself with complacency and readily believes that others are looking at him.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Under despotism, peoples give themselves over from time to time to bursts of mad joy; but, in general, they are sullen and withdrawn, because they are afraid.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[...] all free peoples are serious, because their minds are habitually absorbed in the contemplation of some dangerous or difficult project.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Among a [democratic] people, seriousness is no longer peculiar to certain men; it becomes a national habit.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There are no men who are as attached to their condition as [the people of democracies]. They would find life tasteless if they were freed from the cares that torment them [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
There is a kind of ignorance that is born of extreme publicity.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In despotic states, men do not know how to act, because they are told nothing; in democratic nations, they often act at random, because one wanted to tell them everything.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
When the inhabitant of a democracy is not pressed by his needs, he is at least pressed by his desires; for [...] he sees no [good] that is entirely beyond his reach.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
In democracies, man's existence is more complicated; it is rare that the same mind does not embrace several objects at once [...].
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
His curiosity is at once insatiable and satisfied at little cost; for he wants to know a lot quickly, rather than to know well.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Democratic peoples are serious, because their state [...] constantly leads them to occupy themselves with serious things; and they act inconsiderately, because they give but little time [...] to each of these things.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The habit of inattention must be considered the greatest vice of the democratic mind.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Although the desire to acquire the goods of this world is the dominant passion [...], there are moments of respite when the soul seems to break [...] the material bonds that hold it back, and to escape impetuously towards the heavens.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is not man who has given himself the taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
These sublime instincts are not born from a caprice of his will: they have their immovable foundation in his nature; they exist in spite of his efforts.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Man] can hinder and distort them, but not destroy them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The soul has needs that must be satisfied; and, whatever care is taken to distract it from itself, it soon grows bored, restless, and agitated amidst the pleasures of the senses.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
If the spirit of the great majority of mankind were ever to be concentrated in the sole pursuit of material goods, a prodigious reaction might be expected in the souls of some men.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
[Some] would throw themselves headlong into the world of spirits, for fear of remaining caught in the too-narrow shackles that the body seeks to impose on them.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
I should be surprised if, among a people solely preoccupied with its well-being, mysticism did not soon make progress.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
It is said that it was the persecutions of the emperors [...] that populated the deserts [...]; and I, for my part, think it was rather the delights of Rome and the Epicurean philosophy of Greece.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
The mind feels imprisoned within limits from which it seems one is unwilling to let it out.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
As soon as it oversteps these limits, the mind knows not where to fix itself, and it often runs, without stopping, beyond the bounds of common sense.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America
Here and there one finds [...] souls filled with an exalted and almost fierce spiritualism, which is rarely encountered in Europe.
1835-1840
Source: Democracy in America