Alexis de Tocqueville quotes - page 2

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker, historian, and writer, best known for his analysis of American society in the 19th century. His work “Democracy in America” explored the strengths and challenges of democracy, influencing political thought worldwide. He remains a key figure in the study of political theory and comparative government. Here are 155 of his quotes:

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

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

Alexis de Tocqueville

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

Alexis de Tocqueville

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

Alexis de Tocqueville

The man who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.

Alexis de Tocqueville

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

Alexis de Tocqueville

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

Alexis de Tocqueville

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

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

In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.

Alexis de Tocqueville

What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.

Alexis de Tocqueville

As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery.

Alexis de Tocqueville

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

Alexis de Tocqueville

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

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, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Alexis de Tocqueville

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.

Alexis de Tocqueville