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It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.

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
Care
Concern
Profits
Littles
Masters
Tranquility
Little
Authority
Pleasures
Without
Danger
Absolutes
Always
Protect
Absolute
Avert
Life
Liberty
Profit
Protects
Path
Master
Vigilant
Pleasure
Constantly
Dangers

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Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man.
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The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.
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There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.
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The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.
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The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom.
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With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs.
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I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
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Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.
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Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused.
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If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.
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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.
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The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
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Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves.
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If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.
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When, after having examined in detail the organization of the Supreme Court, one comes to consider in sum the prerogatives that have been given it, one discovers without difficulty that a more immense judicial power has never been constituted in any people.
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European Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately united with the powers of this world. Now that these powers are falling, it is as if it were buried under their ruins.
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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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The character of Anglo-American civilization . . . is the product . . . of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.
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Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.
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Nations, as well as man, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.
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