Alexis de Tocqueville — "I am not a man of systems, and I have no desire to be one."

"The love of equality is sometimes a passion, sometimes a reasonable preference."

"The Negroes who inhabit the United States, are in some measure strangers to the country which gave them birth; they are the children of slavery, and not of society. Therefore, they have no place among…"

"I do not know what to say of a society which, after having created a magnificent civilization, seems to be on the point of destroying itself by its own hands."

"The most dangerous of all errors is to believe that error itself is harmless."

"The American has no past; he has only the present and the future. He lives in a perpetual state of creation; he is forever building, forever destroying, forever renewing."