Alexis De Tocqueville Quotes & Sayings

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

The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity. — 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

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

I have often remarked in the United States that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with; hints will not always suffice to shake him off. I contradict an American at every word he says, to show him that his conversation bores me; he instantly labors with fresh pertinacity to convince me; I preserve a dogged silence, and he thinks I am meditating deeply on the truths which he is uttering; at last I rush from his company, and he supposes that some urgent business hurries me elsewhere. This man will never understand that he wearies me to extinction unless I tell him so: and the only way to get rid of him is to make him my enemy for life. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America ... In the United States ... Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it. — Alexis De Tocqueville

In the United States, there is no end which human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united in a society. — Alexis De Tocqueville

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. — 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

Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot. — Alexis De Tocqueville

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

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

The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian. — Alexis De Tocqueville

People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name "socialism" are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base. — Alexis De Tocqueville

What is understood by republican government in the United States is the slow and quiet action of society upon itself. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The character of Anglo-American civilization ... is the product ... of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The Americans live in a democratic state of society, which has naturally suggested to them certain laws and a certain political character. This — Alexis De Tocqueville

[Patriotism] is in itself a kind of religion: it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and sentiment. — Alexis De Tocqueville

In democratic centuries, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual toward the species are much clearer, devotion toward one man becomes rarer: the bond of human affections is extended and loosened. — Alexis De Tocqueville

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

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. — Alexis De Tocqueville

A nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak — Alexis De Tocqueville

America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. — Alexis De Tocqueville

When the people rule, they must be rendered happy, or they will overturn the state. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society. — Alexis De Tocqueville

It is the civil jury that really saved the liberties of England. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The province of Texas is still part of the Mexican dominions, but it will soon contain no Mexicans; the same thing has occurred whenever the Anglo-Americans have come into contact with populations of a different origin. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort. — 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

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the State until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs. — Alexis De Tocqueville

No African has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the New World; whence it must be inferred, that all the blacks who are now to be found in that hemisphere are either slaves or freedmen. — Alexis De Tocqueville

We need a new political science for a new world. — Alexis De Tocqueville

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular administrative system whose aim is to provide for the needs of the poor will breed more miseries than it can cure, will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort, will dry up the sources of savings, will stop the accumulation of capital, will retard the development of trade, and will benumb human industry. — 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

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 French observer is surprised to hear how often an English or an American lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; ... This abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the English and American lawyer, this servitude of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more conservative inclinations in England and America than in France. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The position of the Americans is quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. — Alexis De Tocqueville

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. — Alexis De Tocqueville

These diverse effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood: ... the men in Kentucky [neither] have zeal nor enlightenment ... cross over into Ohio in order to utilize their industry and to be able to exercise it without shame ... in Kentucky, masters make slaves work without being obliged to pay them, but they receive little fruit from their efforts, while the money that they would give to free workers would be recovered with interest from the value of their labors. — Alexis De Tocqueville

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

Under its sway the transactions of the public administration are not nearly so important as what is done by private exertion. Democracy does not confer the most skilful kind of government upon the people, but it produces that which the most skilful governments are frequently unable to awaken, namely, an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it, and which may, under favorable circumstances, beget the most amazing benefits. These are the true advantages of democracy. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. — Alexis De Tocqueville

No men are less addicted to reverie than the citizens of a democracy. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Germans Francis Grund, and Francis Lieber, and the Pole Adam G. de Gurowski all wrote about the striking social equality they found in America, the absence of differences in status. They all noted the American obsession with work and the restless quest for the "almighty dollar."18 — 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

What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them. — Alexis De Tocqueville

In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I do not find fault with equality for drawing men into the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, but for absorbing them entirely in the search for the pleasures that are permitted. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Theatre is the most democratic side of literature. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference. — Alexis De Tocqueville

When a monarchy gradually transforms itself into a republic, the executive power there preserves titles, honors, respect, and even money long after it has lost the reality of power. The English, having cut off the head of one of their kings and chased another off the throne, still go on their knees to address the successors of those princes. On the other hand, when a republic falls under one man's yoke, the ruler's demeanor remains simple, unaffected, and modest, as if he had not already been raised above everybody. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand. — 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

Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure — Alexis De Tocqueville

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. — Alexis De Tocqueville

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity. — Alexis De Tocqueville

There is hardly a congressman prepared to go home until he has at least one speech printed and sent to his constituents, and he won't let anybody interrupt his harangue until he has made all his useful suggestions about the 24 states of the Union, and especially the district he represents. — Alexis De Tocqueville

It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life ... — Alexis De Tocqueville

I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy ... liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I considered mores to be one of the great general causes responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic ... the term "mores" ... meaning ... habits of the heart. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man. — Alexis De Tocqueville

But a democracy can only obtain truth as the result of experience, and many nations may forfeit their existence whilst they are awaiting the consequences of their errors. — Alexis De Tocqueville

There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate. — Alexis De Tocqueville

If, instead of all the diverse powers which excessively hindered or slowed down the flight of reason of the individual, democratic nations substituted the absolute power of a majority, only the character of this social ill would have been changed. Men would not have achieved the means of living independently; they would simply have lighted upon - a difficult enough task in itself - a new face of enslavement. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Men are much more forcibly struck by those inequalities which exist within the circle of the same class, than with those which may be remarked between different classes. It is more easy for them to admit slavery, than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal infamy and hereditary wretchedness. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I questioned the faithful of all communions; I particularly sought the society of clergymen, who are the depositories of the various creeds and have a personal interest in their survival ... all thought the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property — Alexis De Tocqueville

They took over from the old order not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new. — Alexis De Tocqueville

It is far more important to resist apathy than anarchy or despotism, for apathy can give rise, almost indifferently, to either one. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things ... among democratic nations they are two unequal things. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I observed that equality of condition, though it has not there reached the extreme limit which it seems to have attained in the United States, is constantly approaching it; and that the democracy which governs the American communities appears to be rapidly rising into power in Europe. — Alexis De Tocqueville

In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it. — Alexis De Tocqueville

It is certain that despotism ruins individuals by preventing them from producing wealth much more than by depriving them of what they have already produced; it dries up the source of riches, while it usually respects acquired property. Freedom, on the contrary, produces far more goods than it destroys; and the nations which are favored by free institutions invariably find that their resources increase even more rapidly than their taxes. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization. — Alexis De Tocqueville

If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their character by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I shall not fear to say that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me of all the philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee against themselves that remains to them. The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so ... — Alexis De Tocqueville

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Whether democracy or aristocracy is the better form of government constitutes a very difficult question. But, clearly, democracy inconveniences one person while aristocracy oppresses another. That is a truth which establishes itself and precludes any discussion: you are rich and I am poor. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The more alike men are, the weaker each feels in the face of all. — 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

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

A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house. — Alexis De Tocqueville

How could a society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened, and what can be done with a people master of itself if it not subject to God? — Alexis De Tocqueville

I 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 — Alexis De Tocqueville

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I am of opinion, that, in the democratic ages which are opening upon us, individual independence and local liberties will ever be the produce of artificial contrivance; that centralization will be the natural form of government. — Alexis De Tocqueville

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. — Alexis De Tocqueville