Alexis de Tocqueville

In the United States, there is no shortage of ambitious men, but they are all petty.

The people get the government they deserve.

I have never been more convinced that good politics is good morals applied to the great masses of society.

In a democracy, private citizens see a man of themselves in one who governs; there is no brilliance around him to blind them or any elevation to keep him at a distance.

The will of the nation is one of those phrases that has been most abused by the cunning and the ignorant.

Centralization is a word that is constantly repeated in our day, but almost no one tries to say precisely what it means.

The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic ages.

In the United States, the mother of democracy, we see how the principle of equality spreads and how it penetrates into different habits, opinions, and laws.

It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men.

The tyranny of a legislature is at once more formidable and more contemptible than that of an executive.

The French made, in 1789, the greatest effort that any people has ever made to cut, so to speak, their destiny in two and to separate by an abyss what they had been from what they wanted to be.

In a democracy, each generation is a new people.

The Americans have used liberty to combat the individualism born of equality, and they have won.

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe.

The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to combat the ills and trials of life; he is restless and defiant in his outlook toward the authority of society.

The principle of equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often to regard it as beneficial.

In the United States, the people are enlightened, awake to their own interests, and accustomed to think about them.

The sovereign can no longer say, 'You shall think as I do or die'; but he says, 'You are free not to think as I do; you may keep your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people.'

The American institutions are democratic, not only in their principle but in all their consequences.