We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man’s support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLEAny 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.
More Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
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Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
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In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.
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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 illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.
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Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
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There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
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When a large number of organs of the press come to advance along the same track, their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.
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Rulers who destroy men’s freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. … They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.
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Righteous women in their circle of influence, beginning in the home, can turn the world around.
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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.
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I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
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Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.
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Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure.
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When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
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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.
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America is great because she is good.
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