Quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville

the advantage of democracy is not, as has been sometimes asserted, that it protects the interests of the whole community, but simply that it protects those of the majority.

Democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy.

What one must fear, moreover, is not so much the sight of the immorality of the great as that of immorality leading to greatness.

Amongst civilized nations revolts are rarely excited, except by such persons as have nothing to lose by them;

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words.

One has to understand that equality ends up by infiltrating the world of politics as it does everywhere else. It would be impossible to imagine men forever unequal in one respect, yet equal in others; they must, in the end, come to be equal in all. Now, I am aware of only two means of establishing equality in the world of politics: rights have to be granted to every citizen or to none.

No form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.

Slavery received, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary.

The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.

But a people, having taken its rise in civilization and democracy, which should gradually establish an inequality of conditions, until it arrived at inviolable privileges and exclusive castes, would be a novelty in the world; and nothing intimates that America is likely to furnish so singular an example.

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

Nothing is more repugnant to the human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to forms.

The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals.

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

The language in which thought is embodied is the mere carcass of the thought, and not the idea itself; tribunals may condemn the form, but the sense and spirit of the work is too subtle for their authority.

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

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

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.

nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents.

A central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit. If such an administration succeeds in convincing all the disposable resources of a people, it impairs at least the renewal of those resources.

When the English adopted the institution of the jury, they were a half-barbaric people; they have since become one of the most enlightened nations of the globe, and their attachment to the jury has seemed to increase with their enlightenment.

If I were asked where I place the American aristocracy, I should reply without hesitation that it is not composed of the rich, who are united together by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar.

Democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism--but they will not endure aristocracy.