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I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare and have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another.

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
Another
Welfare
Ever
Instance
Instances
Must
Sacrifice
Lend
Real
Americans
Sacrifices
Great
Hundred
Noticed
Make
Seen
Failed
Public
Hardly
Support
Faithful

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The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
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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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There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
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The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
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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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No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
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The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.
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The world belongs to those with the most energy.
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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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If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States - that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions.
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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.
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To commit violent and unjust acts, it is not enough for a government to have the will or even the power the habits, ideas and passions of the time must lend themselves to their committal.
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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.
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The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.
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Nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal property is augmented and distributed among them, and as the number of those possessing it is increased.
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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.
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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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The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology.
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Life is to be entered upon with courage.
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