top of page
Exlpore more Society quotes

"Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible."

"Half of the world population is dying from poverty and hunger and still you think you are not rich enough."

"The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away."

"A lot of attention has been given over to the Catholic Churches sexual abuse of children in their care, but this attention seems to have been hijacked by the media and has overshadowed the many thousands of victims that endured physical abuse."

"More humane societies are usually smaller, like the Scandinavian countries and Holland, where it is much easier to reach consensus and cooperation."

"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."

"Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike."
Explore more quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

"The passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life."

"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."

"Durability is one of the chief elements of strength. Nothing is either loved or feared but that which is likely to endure."

"Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners."

"The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle."

"Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

"The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express."

"There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it."
bottom of page