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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

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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
Strength
Attributed
Ought
Singular
Growing
Reply
Education
Mainly
Women
Superiority
Prosperity
Americans
Asked

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Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.
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We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.
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America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.
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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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Physical strength therefore is one of the first conditions of happiness and even of the existence of nations.
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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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All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
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Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions
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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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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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If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States - that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions.
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The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.
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There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.
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A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
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[R]eligion cannot share the material strength of the rulers without being burdened with some of the animosity roused against them.
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I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
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One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government...is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.
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