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The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
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
Quality
Liberalism
Politics
Private
Society
Democratic
May
Function
Citizens
Health
Performed
Economy
Functions
Wisdom
Measured
More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville
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 am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.
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In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.
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It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.
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The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.
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You need not value it yourself if you do not wish to but you ought to allow it to us who do value it.
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The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.
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The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.
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The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping from it.
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A newspaper is an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes of his own accord, and talks to you briefly every day of the common wealth, without distracting you from your private affairs.
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You may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you brought them there and they will never reproach you for having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules.
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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.
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They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.
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In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.
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Nations, as well as man, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.
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History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.
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Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
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In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
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The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.
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Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.
Alexis de Tocqueville