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One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government...is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.

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
Consequences
Absence
Consequence
Development
Strength
Individual
Happiest
Government
Inevitably
Follows

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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 have always noticed in politics how often men are ruined by having too good a memory.
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The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.
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Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
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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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Life is to be entered upon with courage.
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He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.
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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.
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So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.
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I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.
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Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase.
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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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The progress of democracy seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.
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I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property
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All around you everything is on the move.
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[Liberty] considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.
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I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support
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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.
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Men will not receive the truth from their enemies, and it is seldom offered to them by their friends.
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How could a society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened, and what can be done with a people master of itself if it not subject to God?
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