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When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

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
Justice
Appeal
Law
Unjust
Right
Appeals
People
Command
Refuse
Contest
Majority
Contests
Mankind
Sovereignty
Simply
Obey

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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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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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Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.
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Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.
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By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.
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Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.
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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.
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The progress of democracy seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.
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As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
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He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.
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This so-called tolerance, which, in my opinion, is nothing but a huge indifference.
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There are at the present time two great nations in the world - allude to the Russians and the Americans. All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power these alone are proceeding along a path to which no limit can be perceived.
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It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.
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We need a new political science for a new world.
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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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The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.
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There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
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The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.
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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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America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not attempted to do. - from Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville