Quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of the nation; manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

Thus the negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his descendants; and although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence.

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

But in the course of thirty years a great change took place, and the North refused to perpetuate what had become the peculiar institution of the South, especially as it gave the South a species of aristocratic preponderance.

While he loved liberty, he detested the crimes that had been committed in its name. Jon J. Ingalls

In other words, the government of the democracy is the only one under which the power which lays on taxes escapes the payment of them.

Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it.

Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?

am unacquainted with His designs, but I shall not cease to believe in them because I cannot fathom them, and I had rather mistrust my own capacity than His justice.

December, 1865, of the celebrated 13th article or amendment of the Constitution, which declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude—except as a punishment for crime—shall exist within the United States.

Theatre is the most democratic side of literature.

to be a government of liberty regulated by law, with such results in the development of strength, in population, wealth, and military and commercial power, as no age had ever witnessed.

The American learns about the law by participating in the making of it. He teaches himself about the forms of government by governing. He watches the great work of society being done every day before his eyes and, in a sense, by his hand. In the United States, all of education is directed toward politics. In Europe, its principal purpose is to prepare people for private life. Citizens take part in public affairs too seldom to prepare them for it in advance.

The Americans of the United States stand in precisely the same position with regard to the peoples of South America as their fathers, the English, occupy with regard to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and all those nations of Europe which receive their articles of daily consumption from England, because they are less advanced in civilization and trade.

In democratic times, enjoyment is keener than in aristocratic centuries, and above all the number of those who taste it is infinitely greater; but on the other hand, one must recognize that hopes and desires are more often disappointed, souls more arouse and more restive, and cares more burning.

He who has set his heart exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach, to grasp, and to enjoy it.

No true power can be founded among men which does not depend upon the free union of their inclinations; and patriotism and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of the body politic to one end.

Consequently, in the United States the law favors those classes which are most interested in evading it elsewhere.

Americans owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus democracy throws [a man] back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he has become their equal.

The jury, which is the most energetic means to make the people rule, is also the most effective means to teach them to rule.

The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it.1

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.

The deeper we penetrate into the working of these parties, the more do we perceive that the object of the one is to limit, and that of the other to extend, the popular authority.