When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLEIn the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
More Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
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I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity.
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Men will not receive the truth from their enemies, and it is seldom offered to them by their friends.
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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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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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Those which we call necessary institutions are simply no more than institutions to which we have become accustomed.
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The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.
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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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To remain silent is the most useful service that a mediocre speaker can render to the public good.
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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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There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
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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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Righteous women in their circle of influence, beginning in the home, can turn the world around.
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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.
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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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Slavery…dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.
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