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Exlpore more Genius quotes
"Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent."
"A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else."
"What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around."
"Genius is an inner inherent intuition and perception. It is not a teachable condition."
"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling."
"A genius does what he masters. An ordinary man tries to master what he does."
"In order to share one's true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool: genius is like a wheel that spins so fast, it at first glance appears to be sitting still."
"Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"No true power can be founded among men which does not depend upon the free union of their inclinations, and patriotism and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of the body politic to one end."
"The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies."
"A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."
"Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains."
"Grant me thirty years of equal division of inheritances and a free press, and I will provide you with a republic."
"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."
"In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny."
"Sixty years is too brief a compass for man's imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart."
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