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A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism.
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
War
Alternative
Long
Alternatives
Always
Triumph
Defeat
Destruction
Places
Almost
Delivers
Nations
Despotism
More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville
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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It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.
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When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
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Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.
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With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs.
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General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.
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Nations, as well as man, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.
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History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
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One has freedom as the principal means of action the other has servitude. Their . . . paths [are] diverse nevertheless, each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.
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Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.
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Life is to be entered upon with courage.
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All revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property - not only are they possessed of property but they live in the condition of men who set the greatest store upon their property.
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As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
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Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.
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Those which we call necessary institutions are simply no more than institutions to which we have become accustomed.
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I have always noticed in politics how often men are ruined by having too good a memory.
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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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Grant me thirty years of equal division of inheritances and a free press, and I will provide you with a republic.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science they bring it within the people's reach.
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
