Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: “Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.”
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLEI 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.
More Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
-
-
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?
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 -
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 -
Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
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.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
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.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
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 -
The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
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.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
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.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE