Alexis de Tocqueville - People Quotes

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The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so...

Alexis de Tocqueville
Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach...

Alexis de Tocqueville
Amongst democratic nations, each new generation is a new people.

Alexis de Tocqueville
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.

Alexis de Tocqueville
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.

Alexis de Tocqueville
The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

Alexis de Tocqueville
In America, there are no noblemen or men of letters, and the people distrust the wealthy. Lawyers therefore constitute the superior political class and the most intellectual segment of society.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

Alexis de Tocqueville
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
I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.

Alexis de Tocqueville
No example is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.

Alexis de Tocqueville
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.

Alexis de Tocqueville
There is no philosopher in the world so great but he believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.

Alexis de Tocqueville
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
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.

Alexis de Tocqueville
In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

Alexis de Tocqueville
When a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it.

Alexis de Tocqueville
The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people.

Alexis de Tocqueville
The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.

Alexis de Tocqueville
When the people rule, they must be rendered happy, or they will overturn the state.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?

Alexis de Tocqueville
I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.

Alexis de Tocqueville
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult—to begin a war and to end it.

Alexis de Tocqueville
If I were asked…to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.

Alexis de Tocqueville