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Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.

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
Based
Republican
Nobody
Signifies
Higher
Slogan
Place
Slogans
Heart
Occupy
Going
Equality
Every
Envy

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I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy....liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth.
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In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.
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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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The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.
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A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
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Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
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Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions
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Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.
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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.
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The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.
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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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Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be.
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In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
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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.
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It is from the midst of this putrid sewer that the greatest river of human industry springs up and carries fertility to the whole world. From this foul drain pure gold flows forth.
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