Alexis de Tocqueville

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Alexis de Tocqueville > Quotes

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville
“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville
“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”


― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volume 2
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville
“There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.”