508 Quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

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.

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends

A whole nation cannot rise above itself.

There is nothing more prodigal of wonders than the art of being free ... but nothing is harder than the apprenticeship of liberty.

There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

Sixty years is too brief a compass for man’s imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart.

Slavery received, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary.

Durability is one of the chief elements of strength. Nothing is either loved or feared but that which is likely to endure.