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Despotism may be able to do without religion, but democracy cannot.

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
Without
Despotism
Democracy
Religious
Religion
Christian
Cannot
May
Able

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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.
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It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.
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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.
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When the people rule, they must be rendered happy, or they will overturn the state.
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We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.
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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.
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The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping from it.
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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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Democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of their country and themselves.
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Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.
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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.
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Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.
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You may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you brought them there and they will never reproach you for having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules.
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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.
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I see no clear reason why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should turn men away from religious beliefs.
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I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
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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.
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There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
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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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