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What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

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
Done
Attempted

More quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

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Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.
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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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Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man.
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger. It is patient, supple, and insinuating, only resorting to extreme measures in cases of absolute necessity.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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On this waterlogged landscape....are scattered palaces and hovels....It is here that the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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When the people rule, they must be rendered happy, or they will overturn the state.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Those which we call necessary institutions are simply no more than institutions to which we have become accustomed.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its duration.
Alexis de Tocqueville