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Remember that life is neither pain nor pleasure it is serious business, to be entered upon with courage and in a spirit of self-sacrifice.

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
Pain
Business
Entered
Spirit
Neither
Remember
Sacrifice
Self
Courage
Life
Serious
Pleasure
Upon

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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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America is a country where they have freedom of speech but everyone says the same thing.
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Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.
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I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.
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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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When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
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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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But what most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones.
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When an American asks for the cooperation of his fellow citizens, it is seldom refused and I have often seen it afforded spontaneously and with great good will.
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The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic times.
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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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In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude all energetic passions are directed towards it.
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Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?
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everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure
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Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.
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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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Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.
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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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The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.
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No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
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