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The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.

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
Turns
Spite
Cannot
Laws
Constitution
Best
Advantage
Work
Turn
Make
Worst
Law
Moral
Morals

More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

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Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man.
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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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The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic times.
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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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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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America is a country where they have freedom of speech but everyone says the same thing.
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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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A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism.
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A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst.
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They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.
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The foremost or indeed sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.
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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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History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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All around you everything is on the move.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Better use has been made of association and this powerful instrument of action has been applied for more varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not raise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.
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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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Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its duration.
Alexis de Tocqueville