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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
Move
Moving
Around
Everything

More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

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History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Righteous women in their circle of influence, beginning in the home, can turn the world around.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
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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Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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America is great because she is good.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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
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The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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
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I have always noticed in politics how often men are ruined by having too good a memory.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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In America, conscription is unknown men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.
Alexis de Tocqueville