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
I see no clear reason why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should turn men away from religious beliefs.
I shall not fear to say that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me of all the philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee against themselves that remains to them. The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary.
By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.
He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.
There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.
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.
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.
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.
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.
What is the 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.
turn against themselves and consider their hopes as having been childish--their enthusiasm and, above all, their devotion absurd.
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.
The will of the nation' is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age