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
The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.
Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.
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.
Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.
A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.
Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
Life is to be entered upon with courage.
A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.
The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.