Quote

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.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Time
Hardly
Volumes
Drama
Pioneer
Education
Pioneers
Reading
Henry
Remember
Contain
Feudal
Doe
Volume
Cabin
Firsts
Shakespeare
Cabins
First
Odd
Huts

More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

Image
Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
To remain silent is the most useful service that a mediocre speaker can render to the public good.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy those who had anything united in common terror.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
I considered mores to be one of the great general causes responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic . . . the term mores . . . meaning . . . habits of the heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
[R]eligion cannot share the material strength of the rulers without being burdened with some of the animosity roused against them.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
If I were asked ... to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of Americans ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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
Image
Countries, therefore, when lawmaking falls exclusively to the lot of the poor cannot hope for much economy in public expenditure expenses will always be considerable, either because taxes cannot touch those who vote for them or because they are assessed in a way to prevent that.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
You need not value it yourself if you do not wish to but you ought to allow it to us who do value it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.
Alexis de Tocqueville