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He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.

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
Great
Men
Napoleon
Sarcastic
Morality
Without

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The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
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Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
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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 civil jury is the most effective form of sovereignty of the people. It defies the aggressions of time and man. During the reigns of Henry VIII (1509-1547) and Elizabeth I (1158-1603), the civil jury did in reality save the liberties of England.
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In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries.
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In democratic countries as well as elsewhere most of the branches of productive industry are carried on at a small cost by men little removed by their wealth or education above the level of those whom they employ.
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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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Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.
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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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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 last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.
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There is no philosopher in the world so great but he believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.
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On this waterlogged landscape....are scattered palaces and hovels....It is here that the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.
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I avow that I do not hold that complete and instantaneous love for the freedom of the press that one accords to things whose nature is unqualifiedly good. I love it out of consideration for the evils it prevents much more than for the good it does.
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The world belongs to those with the most energy.
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The character of Anglo-American civilization . . . is the product . . . of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.
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The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
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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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He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things...among democratic nations they are two unequal things.
Alexis de Tocqueville