508 Quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

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

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.

The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of the nation; manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

Nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence or zeal.

There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he has become their equal.

The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.

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.

It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.