Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Nations, as well as man, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Years
Betray
Always
Features
Men
Destiny
Almost
Nations
Future
Wells
Prominent
Well
Earliest
More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Despotism may be able to do without religion, but democracy cannot.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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
I considered mores to be one of the great general causes responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic . . . the term mores . . . meaning . . . habits of the heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
Alexis de Tocqueville
When fortune has been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone, an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects.
Alexis de Tocqueville
A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
This so-called tolerance, which, in my opinion, is nothing but a huge indifference.
Alexis de Tocqueville
We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
Alexis de Tocqueville
One has freedom as the principal means of action the other has servitude. Their . . . paths [are] diverse nevertheless, each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.
Alexis de Tocqueville
In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order.
Alexis de Tocqueville
He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.
Alexis de Tocqueville
When none but the wealthy had watches, they were almost all very good ones few are now made which are worth much, but everybody has one in his pocket.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Of all the countries of the world America is the one where the movement of thought and human industry is the most continuous and swift.
Alexis de Tocqueville
