Alexis De Tocqueville

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.

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

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.

Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

A French observer is surprised to hear how often an English or an American lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; ... This abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the English and American lawyer, this servitude of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more conservative inclinations in England and America than in France.

He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.

America is a country where they have freedom of speech but everyone says the same thing.

There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.

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.