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"There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality."
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"The financial elite already have the politicians in their pockets, as a result of their lobbying."
"In reality, commissions rarely solve complicated problems. Therefore, the following question arises: what is worse " to establish a commission knowing it cannot solve a complicated problem, or to believe that the commission will truly solve such a problem?"
"The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things."
"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government."
"Any nation that teaches and make there people look for miracles are making their people weak."
"A statesman who is enamored of existing evils as distin-quished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others."
"When a religious system or a government organizes into a bureaucracy, it is the bureaucracy that incessantly moves all activities increasingly and inevitably towards it's own destruction. The momentum will always become greater than the influence of it's wisest members."
"Every word of etatistic thought is contradicted by the doctrines of sociology and economics; this is why etatists endeavour to prove that these sciences do not exist. In their opinion, social affairs are shaped by the State. To the law, all things are possible; and there is no sphere in which State intervention is not omnipotent."
"For the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have."
"How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?"
Explore more quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville
"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all."
"Now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women."
"During my stay in the United States, I witnessed the spontaneous formation of committees in a country for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime. In Europe, a criminal is an unhappy man who is struggling for his life against the agents of power, whilst the people are merely a spectator of the conflict: in America, he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him."
"When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy, they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters."
"Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die."
"I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence."
"The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it."
"It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity."
"Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved."
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