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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.

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
Law
Substitute
Common
Substitutes
Sense
Provided
Political
Morality
Everything
Institutions
Country
Laws
World
Prove
Public

More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

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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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In democratic centuries, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual toward the species are much clearer, devotion toward one man becomes rarer: the bond of human affections is extended and loosened.
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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.
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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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Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life what is most important for it is not that all citizens profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.
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The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
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Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian.
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It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor as such differences become less, it grows feeble and when they disappear, it will vanish too.
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The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
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I see no clear reason why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should turn men away from religious beliefs.
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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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On close inspection, we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic period is the taste that all men have for easy success and present enjoyment. This occurs in the pursuits of the intellect as well as in others.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.
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It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.
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No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.
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Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.
Alexis de Tocqueville