Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

Life is to be entered upon with courage.

Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.

A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.A principle of authority must then always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has. The independence of individual minds may be greater, or it may be less: unbounded it cannot be. Thus the question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in the ages of democracy, but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured.

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.