There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLEThere are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
More Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
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America is great because she is good.
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Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure.
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Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.
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If I were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of Americans ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
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The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppression, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects.
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The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
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I vow that I do not hold that complete and instantaneous love for the freedom of the press that one accords to things whose nature is unqualifiedly good. I love it out of consideration for the evils it prevents much more than for the good it does.
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When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
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When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.
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A man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
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There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.
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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.
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If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.
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A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
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The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.
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The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.
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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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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.
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Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.
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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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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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One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.
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The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
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Socialism is a new form of slavery.
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As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
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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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