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
[Liberty] considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.
The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things...among democratic nations they are two unequal things.
I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity.
Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach...
Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.
The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.
It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life....
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.
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship 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
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.