Quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.

Remember that life is neither pain nor pleasure; it is serious business, to be entered upon with courage and in a spirit of self-sacrifice.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing.

It is shades that clash, not colors.

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

Never was any such event [the French Revolution], stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen.

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

If I were asked… to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

I have never been more struck by the good sense and the practical judgment of the Americans than in the manner in which they elude the numberless difficulties resulting from their Federal Constitution.

Experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself.

Within these limits the power vested in the American courts of justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional forms one of the most powerful barriers that have ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies.

The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration.

When a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it.

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

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

Life is to be entered upon with courage.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.