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The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.

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
Game
Games
Chance
Rebellious
American
Passed
America
Revolutionary
Whole
Crisis
Life
Like
Battle

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Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.
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But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
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The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.
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It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.
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Despotism may be able to do without religion, but democracy cannot.
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Socialism is a new form of slavery.
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No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.
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A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
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I do not find fault with equality for drawing men into the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, but for absorbing them entirely in the search for the pleasures that are permitted.
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There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
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I know without needing to hear the voice of the Creator that the stars trace out in space the orbits which His hand has drawn.
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everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure
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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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If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.
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No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
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In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.
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As I see it, only God can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power. Thus there is no authority on earth so inherently worthy of respect, or invested with a right so sacred, that I would want to let it act without oversight or rule without impediment (p. 290).
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In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.
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Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America... In the United States... Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.
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Those which we call necessary institutions are simply no more than institutions to which we have become accustomed.
Alexis de Tocqueville