Sourced and curated.

Freedom alone substitutes from time to time for the love of material comfort more powerful and more lofty passions; it alone supplies ambition with greater objectives than the acquisition of riches, and creates the light that makes it possible to see and to judge the vices and virtues of mankind.

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 1.9

The French Revolution operated in reference to this world in exactly the same manner as religious revolutions acted in view of the other world. It considered the citizen as an abstract proposition apart from any particular society, in the same way as religions considered man as man, independent of country and time.

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 1.9

There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points; I allude to the Russians and the Americans... Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 2.1

Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 2.2

I have never been more struck by the good sense and the practical judgment of the Americans than in the manner in which they elude the numberless difficulties resulting from their Federal Constitution.

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction. On either side it is pride, but understood in a different way.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 2.9

Personal journal

1835

★ 3.6

It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution... The social order destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 3.6

Despots themselves do not deny that freedom is excellent; only they desire it for themselves alone, and they maintain that everyone else is altogether unworthy of it.

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 3.6

America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 3.7

Within these limits, the power vested in American courts of justice, of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional, forms one of the most powerful barriers that has ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 3.7

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 3.8

Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 3.8

Nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 3.9

At every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure; and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a small number of conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a firmer grasp on truth, or finding novelty even in its errors.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 3.9

They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 4.5

Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.... Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 5.4

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

Religious insanity is very common in the United States.