Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville -
States
Quotes
36 Sourced Quotes
View all Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes
Source
Report...
The new states of the West are already inhabited, but society has no existence among them.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
The President may slip without the state suffering, for his duties are limited. Congress may slip without the Union perishing, for above Congress there is the electoral body which can change its spirit by changing its membership. But if ever the Supreme Court came to be composed of rash or corrupt men, the confederation would be threatened by anarchy or civil war.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
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.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States that have abolished slaves than in the States where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern State...
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source
Report...
On my arrival in the United States I was struck by the degree of ability among the governed and the lack of it among the governing.
Alexis de Tocqueville
1
2
Quote of the day
True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.
Willard Libby
Alexis de Tocqueville
Creative Commons
Born:
July 29, 1805
Died:
April 16, 1859
(aged 53)
More about Alexis de Tocqueville...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes