Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocquevillewas a French diplomat, political scientist, and historian. He was best known for his works Democracy in Americaand The Old Regime and the Revolution. In both he analyzed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals, as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States, and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth29 July 1805
CountryFrance
The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation.
In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.
Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.
To remain silent is the most useful service that a mediocre speaker can render to the public good.
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping from it.
Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.
Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves.
When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.
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.
Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.
Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.
Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions because it loves moderation, delights in compromise an is most careful to avoid anger.
Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.