Quote

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
People
American
Universe
Absorbed
Political
Rises
Ends
Reign
Back
Rules
Everything
Cause
Things
Causes
World
Politics

More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

Image
Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy those who had anything united in common terror.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
I know without needing to hear the voice of the Creator that the stars trace out in space the orbits which His hand has drawn.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
America is great because she is good.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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
Image
The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
The world belongs to those with the most energy.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
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
Image
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Image
Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge on its progress depends that of all the others.
Alexis de Tocqueville