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 TOCQUEVILLEIf 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.
More Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
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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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Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
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History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
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The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.
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I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support.
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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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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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Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
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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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The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
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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.
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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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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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Socialism is a new form of slavery.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE