Alexis De Tocqueville Quotes

I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are out of their natural connections, 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?

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

On close inspection, we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I follow the course marked out by my principles and, what is more, enjoy a deep and noble pleasure in following it. You deeply despise the human race, at least our part of it; you think it not only fallen but incapable of ever rising again... For my part, as I feel neither the right nor the wish to entertain such opinions of my species and my country, I think it is not necessary to despair of them. In my opinion, human societies, like individuals, amount to something only in liberty...And God forbid that my mind should ever be crossed by the thought that it is necessary to despair of success... You will allow me to have less confidence in your teaching than in the goodness and justice of God.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

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.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The principle of equality, which makes men independent of each other, gives them a habit and a taste for following, in their private actions, no other guide but their own will. This complete independence, which they constantly enjoy towards their equals and in the intercourse of private life, tends to make them look upon all authority with a jealous eye, and speedily suggests to them the notion and the love of political freedom. Men living at such times have a natural bias to free institutions. Take any one of them at a venture, and search if you can his most deep-seated instincts; and you will find that, of all governments, he will soonest conceive and most highly value that government whose head he has himself elected, and whose administration he may control.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A whole nation cannot rise above itself.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

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.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

When justice is more certain and more mild, is at the same time more efficacious.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power, or debased by the habit of obedience; but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

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.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Sixty years is too brief a compass for man’s imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A man is born; his first years go by in obscurity amid the pleasures or hardships of childhood. He grows up; then comes the beginning of manhood; finally society's gates open to welcome him; he comes into contact with his fellows. For the first time he is scrutinized and the seeds of the vices and virtues of his maturity are thought to be observed forming in him. This is, if I am not mistaken, a singular error.Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first word which arouse with him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

For benefits by their very greatness spotlight the difference in conditions and arouse a secret annoyance in those who profit from them. But the charm of simple good manners is almost irresistible.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Egotism fears its own self.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, those who had anything united in common terror.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.

~ 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.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence or zeal.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

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

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends

~ Alexis De Tocqueville