Alexis de Tocqueville

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

What I most admire in America is not the material, but the moral or intellectual phenomena.

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals.

The genius of democracy is seen in the quiet, steady, and pervasive influence it exercises on the whole community.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.

The love of equality is stronger than the love of liberty in democratic nations.

In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes.

The Revolution came so suddenly that it was scarcely noticed.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform itself.

It is not always the same thing to possess liberty as to be free.

The French Revolution will be judged eternally.

Nations grow rapidly like families.

The past has no existence except in the present.

I confess that in America I saw more than America; I saw there the image of democracy itself.

To be free is not to be equal; to be equal is not to be free.

Men are not corrupted by power; they are corrupted by the abuse of power.

The man who asks his wife what he should wear to a dinner party is a man who has no idea what he is or who he is.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of circumstances, men find themselves in a state where it is almost impossible to exercise their reason.