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Grant me thirty years of equal division of inheritances and a free press, and I will provide you with a republic.

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
Press
Inheritance
India
Grant
Equal
Grants
Free
Division
Years
Republic
Thirty
Presses
Provide
Inheritances

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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.
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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?
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[R]eligion cannot share the material strength of the rulers without being burdened with some of the animosity roused against them.
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I see no clear reason why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should turn men away from religious beliefs.
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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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The aspect of American society is animated, because men and things are always changing but it is monotonous, because all the changes are alike.
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No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
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America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.
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The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
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It is from the midst of this putrid sewer that the greatest river of human industry springs up and carries fertility to the whole world. From this foul drain pure gold flows forth.
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The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppression, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects.
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The foremost or indeed sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.
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Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase.
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The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.
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Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man.
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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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History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.
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At the head of any new undertaking where in France you would find the government, or in England some great lord, in the United States you are sure to find an association.
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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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There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
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