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Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

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
Laws
Unless
Nation
Law
Durable
Nations
Unstable
Power
Resisting
Always
Founded
People
Manners

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The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.
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Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.
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Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
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I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.
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The position of the Americans is quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.
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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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I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare and have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another.
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Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge on its progress depends that of all the others.
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I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.
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We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
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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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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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The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.
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Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves.
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The man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance but when he submits to that right of authority which he acknowledges in a fellow creature, he rises in some measure above the person who give the command.
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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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The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom.
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Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.
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When none but the wealthy had watches, they were almost all very good ones few are now made which are worth much, but everybody has one in his pocket.
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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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