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Life is to be entered upon with courage.

Alexis de Tocqueville

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Alexis de Tocqueville
Age: 53 †
Born: 1805
Born: July 29
Died: 1859
Died: April 16
Historian
Jurist
Philosopher
Politician
Sociologist
Writer
Paris
France
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Tocqueville
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville
Life
Entered
Anxiety
Courage
Worry
Upon

More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

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Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting all men to the same rule.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not attempted to do. - from Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The Americans make associations to give entertainment, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes in this manner, they found hospitals, prisons and schools.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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What is understood by republican government in the United States is the slow and quiet action of society upon itself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare and have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science they bring it within the people's reach.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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[Liberty] considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Among the droves of men with political ambitions in the United States, I found very few with that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in earlier times and that is invariably the preeminent trait of great characters wherever it exists.
Alexis de Tocqueville