Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville (French Historian, Political Scientist)

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59,) fully Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville, was a French diplomat, sociologist, political philosopher, and historian. He profoundly shaped debates about liberalism and equality in the nineteenth century, mainly through his study of American democracy. Tocqueville was rediscovered in the twentieth century as a prophetic critic of state power, and he remains one of the leading influences on democratic theory.

Born in an aristocratic family in Paris, he was called to the Bar in 1825 and became an assistant-magistrate at Versailles. In 1831, he was sent by the French government to the USA to report on the penal system, and on his return published a sweeping study of U.S. political and social institutions, De la démocratie en Amerique (1835–40, 4 vols.; Democracy in America.) The book immediately found a broad readership and became one of the most influential political writings of the 19th century. It remains one of the excellent European commentaries on U.S. politics and society.

Tocqueville became a member of the Chamber of Deputies (1839,) and, in 1849, was vice-president of the Assembly, and briefly Minister of Foreign Affairs.

After Napoleon III’s coup d’état, Tocqueville retired to his estate, where he wrote the first volume of L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856; The Old Regime and the Revolution,) but he died before another volume could be completed.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Alexis de Tocqueville

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.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Class

We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Work, Talents, Success, Excellence, Appropriateness, Abilities, Aptness, Self-Knowledge

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
Topics: Law, Manners

The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Words

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.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Democracy

There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: War

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Religion

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 they do not form a class.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Wealth

It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Children, Girls

The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.
—Alexis de Tocqueville

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.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Equality

The institution of the jury, if confined to criminal cases, is always in danger; but when once it is introduced into civil proceedings, it defies the aggressions of time and of man.
—Alexis de Tocqueville

Amongst democratic nations, each generation is a new people.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Generations

Of all the countries in the world, America is that in which the spread of ideas and of human industry is the most continual and most rapid.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: America

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
Topics: Truth

It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.
—Alexis de Tocqueville

Among a democratic people, where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living, or is born of parents who have worked. The notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind, on every side, as the necessary, natural, and honest condition.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Work

In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: It attracts the attention of the public and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Action, Business

Muhammad professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other – beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Christianity

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Honor

In order to civilize a people, it is necessary first to fix it, and this cannot be done without inducing it to cultivate the soil.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Civilization

In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies.
—Alexis de Tocqueville

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Women

Local assemblies of the people con stitute the strength of free nations.—Municipal institutions are to liberty, what primary schools are to science: they bring it within the people’s reach, and teach them how to use and enjoy it—A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: People

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Property

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Education

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 for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Apathy

Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Solitude, Isolation

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Revolutions, Revolutionaries, Revolution

The first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unfortunate races have neither birth, nor face, nor language, nor mores in common; only their misfortunes look alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same author for them.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Topics: Racism

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