"Tocqueville" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Napoleon. About probably knows the truth about the men of '92 and '93 as well as anybody, but he thinks it desirable that the illusions respecting them should continue. They are, he says, an important political factor. Whereas Taine, like the late MM. Lanfrey and De Tocqueville, loving truth for its own sake, slashes away without caring for the practical result. I was told by an intimate and lifelong friend of both men that it had required the most persistent efforts of persons situated like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... des ages democratiques, soyez-en sur, c'est la destruction ou l'affaiblissement excessif des parties du corps social en presence du tout. Tout ce qui releve de nos jours l'idee de l'individu est sain.—TOCQUEVILLE, Jan. 3, 1840, OEuvres, vii. 97. En France, il n'y a plus d'hommes. On a systematiquement tue l'homme au profit du peuple, des masses, comme disent nos legislateurs ecerveles. Puis un beau jour, on s'est apercu que ce peuple n'avait jamais existe qu'en projet, que ces masses etaient ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... De Tocqueville two generations ago, democracy disposes every man to forget his ancestors. When the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas was once asked to prepare an account of his career for a biographical history of Congress, he chose to omit all but the barest reference to his forefathers.[1] Possibly he preferred ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... De Tocqueville, "Democracy in the United States;" and Michel Chevalier, "Letters on North America." Plutarch tells us, "Life of Pericles," that in Athens honest people were obliged to conceal themselves while studying, fearing they would be regarded as aspirants ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Mr. Henry Reeve is perhaps the most striking illustration in our time of how little in English life influence is measured by notoriety. To the outer world his name was but little known. He is remembered as the translator of Tocqueville, as the editor of the 'Greville Memoirs,' as the author of a not quite forgotten book on Royal and Republican France, showing much knowledge of French literature and politics; as the holder during fifty years of the ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... democracy is irresistible," says De Tocqueville, "because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... idea for which Germany now stands, the Anglo-Saxon instinctively and tenaciously believes in the liberty and initiative of the individual. We, of course, are no longer Anglo-Saxon. When De Tocqueville in 1831 visited our country, surveyed our institutions and, after returning home, made his trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he could justly designate us Anglo-Americans. That time is past; we are to-day everything and nothing: a great nation in the womb of time, ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... leading part in the affairs they relate to, and as embodying vividly the opinions and aspirations of the moment, less frequently in respect of permanent lessons of political wisdom, such as one finds in Machiavelli or Tocqueville or Edmund Burke. Like Pitt and Peel, Mr. Gladstone had a mind which, whatever its original tendencies, had come to be rather practical than meditative. He was fond of generalizations and principles, but they were always directly related to the questions that came before ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... tolerant of our faults, and eloquent over our virtues; and not a little good feeling has been produced among our educated classes by the fairness and acuteness with which one of the greatest of modern Frenchmen, De Tocqueville, has considered our institutions. On the other hand, the English press and the English Parliament have been outspoken in their contempt of America; and the offence has been enhanced by the peculiarly insulting terms in ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... considered, it still seems to me that the parliamentary system, when it rests on manhood suffrage, or something closely approaching to manhood suffrage, is extremely unlikely to be permanent. This was evidently the opinion of Tocqueville, who was strongly persuaded that the natural result of democracy was a highly concentrated, enervating, but mild despotism. It is the opinion of many of the most eminent contemporary thinkers in France and Germany, and it is, I think, steadily growing in England. This does not mean that parliaments ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... hard to write about any country a book that does not represent the country described in a more or less ridiculous point of view. It is hard at least to do so in such a book as I must write. A de Tocqueville may do it. It may be done by any philosophico-political or politico-statistical, or statistico- scientific writer; but it can hardly be done by a man who professes to use a light pen, and to manufacture his article for the use of general readers. Such ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... a freedom that was gone for ever, the opening of the States of Languedoc. Antiquaries and philosophers went to moralise on the spectacle in the spirit in which Freeman went to Andorra, Byron to the site of Troy, or De Tocqueville to America. It was there that the great ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... is run in speaking thus before practical men. I know what De Tocqueville says of you. 'The man of the North,' he says, 'has not only experience, but knowledge. He, however, does not care for science as a pleasure, and only embraces it with avidity when it leads to useful applications.' But what, I would ask, are the hopes of ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... Progress. This view, represented by leaders of the popular movement against the bourgeois ascendency, derived powerful reinforcement from one of the most enlightened political thinkers of the day. The appearance of de Tocqueville's renowned study of American democracy was the event of 1834. He was convinced that he had discovered on the other side of the Atlantic the answer to the question whither the world is tending. In American society he found ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... nearly half a century since the works of De Tocqueville and De Beaumont, founded upon personal observation, brought the institutions of the United States effectually within the circle of European thought and interest. They were co-operators, but not upon an ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Barlow, the Lost Pleiad of the group, whose head had been turned by the bewildering theories of his French fellow-citizens, were warmly in favor of administering the new government on Federal principles. Were not the Federalists right? More than thirty years ago, De Tocqueville pronounced in their favor; De Witt, in his recent essay on Jefferson, comes to the same decision: both observers who have no party-feelings nor class-prejudices to mislead them. And have not the last few years given us all light enough to see that abstractly, as statesmen, the Federal leaders ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... responsibility in public affairs, which in times of crisis may add to their tenacity and endurance. The determination of the Federals in the American Civil War, and of the French and British in the four years' struggle against Germany, may be legitimately adduced as arguments for democracy. When De Tocqueville says that 'it is hard for a democracy to begin or to end a war,' the second is truer than the first. And, secondly, the educational value of democracy is so great that it may be held to counterbalance many defects. Mill decides ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... his tone. Melbourne told Clarendon that Palmerston was still very sore at the articles which had appeared in the 'Times,' and at the communications that had taken place between parties here and their French correspondents, and he particularly mentioned Reeve's with Tocqueville—Lord Lansdowne having probably shown Palmerston the letter which Tocqueville wrote to Reeve[1] just before the great debate in the Chamber. Clarendon said he could not imagine what Palmerston had to complain of in the 'Times,' as, though there had been some articles ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the state of feeling of the thirties that the Negro would be annihilated. De Tocqueville also observed that the Negroes were more detested in the free States than in those where they were held as slaves.[14] There had been such a reaction since 1800 that no positions of consequence were open to Negroes, however well educated they might ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... than it was in 1789, that—as Arthur Young told the French mob which stopped his carriage—the rich pay many taxes (over and above the poor-rates, a direct tax on the capitalist in favour of the labourer) more than are paid by the poor. "In England" (says M. de Tocqueville of even the eighteenth century) "the poor man enjoyed the privilege of exemption from taxation; in France, the rich." Equality before the law is as well-nigh complete as it can be, where some are rich and others poor; and the only privileged class, it sometimes ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... Paris, Tocqueville's Democracy in America was published, and immediately gave its author European fame. It did not probably exercise much influence over Cavour in the formation of opinions, but he found his own confirmed in it both as ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... situation one of equality is irony. It is certain that, far as we are yet from final solution of the problems of production, we are still farther from a solution of the problems of the distribution of wealth. "A new and fair division of the goods and rights of this world should be," De Tocqueville long ago declared, "the main object of all who conduct human affairs." What methods of equalizing opportunity ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... un plaisir ni une douleur, mais une affaire grave dont nous sommes charges, et qu'il faut conduire et terminer a notre honneur' TOCQUEVILLE ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... both cases were arranged by a man of genius, after careful forethought, and upon a special design. Napoleon built upon a clear stage which the French Revolution bequeathed him. The originality once ascribed to his edifice was indeed untrue; Tocqueville and Lavergne have shown that he did but run up a conspicuous structure in imitation of a latent one before concealed by the mediaeval complexities of the old regime. But what we are concerned with now is, not Napoleon's originality, but his ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... brilliant and distinguished Mme. de Peyronnet, an Englishwoman by birth, married to a man of distinguished French family, who occupied an official post in the post-Restoration Administration. Mme. de Peyronnet formed part of the memorable group of Liberals of which Tocqueville was one of the most distinguished members;—a group which from the latter part of Louis- Philippe's reign to the break-up of the Third Empire comprised as notable a body of intellectuals as were ever brought together even in the city of Paris—the natural home of ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... content with quoting this work without indicating further sources. An instructive account of the centralization under Louis XIV is given in Sir J. Stephens's Lectures on the History of France, Lect. 21-23. The reign of Louis XV is treated in De Tocqueville's Histoire Philosophie du Regne de Louis XV. A brief view of the history may be seen in the works of the liberal Roman catholic, C. Butler, vol. v. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... De Tocqueville's L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution; P. Janet's Philosophie de la Revolution Francaise; Quinet, La Revolution; The Essays on the Revolution, by Burke, Mackintosh, Croker; Macaulay's Essays on ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... things would have been poured into his lap. But he preferred to breast the stream, to speak ungrateful truths. He set a wholesome example in this respect; none the less valuable because so few have had the manliness and self-reliance to imitate him. More than twenty years ago De Tocqueville said,—"I know of no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America": words which we fear are not less true to-day than when they were written. Cooper's dauntless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... n'y a pas de plus dangereux exemple que celui de la violence exercee pour le bien et par les gens de bien."—"L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution," par Alexis de Tocqueville, Paris, 1856, p. 310.] ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his first Long Vacation he spent in travelling through Germany, Holland, and Belgium with his father. Later, in August, he visited Jersey and Guernsey, and went to France alone, making pilgrimage from Cherbourg to Tocqueville's two houses, and filling notebooks with observations on Norman architecture at St. Lo, Coutances, and elsewhere. He was perfecting his mastery of the language, too, and notes long after: "On this journey I was once taken for a Frenchman, but my French was not ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... That was Greg's theory of government from first to last. It was derived at this time, I suppose, from Burke, without the powerful correctives and indispensable supplements that are to be found in Burke's earlier writings. Some one said of De Tocqueville, who afterwards became Mr. Greg's friend, and who showed in a milder form the same fear of democracy, 'Il a commence a penser avant d'avoir rien appris; ce qui fait qu'il a quelquefois pense creux.' What is to be said for Mr. Greg, now and always, is that he most honourably ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... the political downfall of Chateaubriand, and of many of Madame Recamier's best friends. But there was a younger class of an opposite school who now came forward, and the more eminent of these were also frequent visitors to the old queen of society,—Ampere, Thiers, Mignet, Guizot, De Tocqueville, Sainte-Beuve. Nor did she lose the friendship, in her altered fortunes, of queens and nobles. She seems to have been received with the greatest cordiality in whatever chateau she chose to visit. Even Louis Napoleon, on ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... close. It could not well do otherwise than weaken during the European disasters which marked his later years. By the death of Louis XIV in 1715 the colony lost its most unwavering friend. The shrewdest of French historians, De Tocqueville, has somewhere remarked that "the physiognomy of a government may be best judged in the colonies.... When I wish to study the spirit and faults of the administration of Louis XIV," he writes, "I must go to Canada, for its deformity is there ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... is, I think, nothing in this paragraph really inconsistent with De Tocqueville's well-known and striking chapter, 'Comment les hommes de lettres devinrent les principaux hommes politiques du pays, et des effets qui en resulterent.' (Ancien Regime, iii. i.) Thus Senac de Meilhan writes in ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... him back by insisting on his duty to his family, nor would she persuade him to rob the public stores, or time, by taking little perquisites or shortening his office hours. She would feel with De Tocqueville, who says, "A hundred times I have seen weak men show real public virtue, because they had by their sides women who supported them—not by advice as to particulars, but by fortifying their feelings of ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... so much (since the days of De Tocqueville, the first to mention it) as the prominent position of woman in the best society of America. She has almost no position in the political world. She is not a leader, an intrigante in politics, as she is in France. We have no Madame de Stael, no Princess Belgioso, here to make and ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... and what the French call our nature moutonniere, our tendency to leap where the sheep in front of us has leapt, becomes more and more prevalent in politics, in religion, in art, and even in science. M. de Tocqueville expressed his surprise how much more Frenchmen of the present day resemble one another than did those of the last generation. The same remark, adds John Stuart Mill, might be made of England in a greater degree. "The modern regime of public opinion," ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... Tocqueville belongs scarcely less to America than to France. His book on "Democracy in America" was the foundation of his fame. As a successful investigation by a foreigner of the nature and working of institutions dissimilar ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... the causes, and to declare the results of this marvelous popular political development in the New World has been the ambition of our historians. Nay more, the "American experiment" has interested the talent of Europe; and our political literature is already enriched by De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," by von Holst's "Constitutional and Political History of the United States," and by Bryce's "American Commonwealth." Ever since its adoption the Constitution of the "Fathers" has been the most popular text-book of constitution drafters ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... went to ports in the South of Europe, and was thence diffused through Europe. That London and Liverpool should be centres of East Indian commerce is a geographical anomaly, which the Suez Canal, it was said, would rectify. 'The Greeks,' said M. de Tocqueville, 'the Styrians, the Italians, the Dalmatians, and the Sicilians, are the people who will use the Canal if any use it.' But, on the contrary, the main use of the Canal has been by the English. None of the nations named by Tocqueville had the capital, or a tithe of ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... fused and recast into a homogeneous whole. It is an ungenerous trick of criticism to disparage good work by comparing it with better; but the reader can scarcely help contrasting M. Taine's overcrowded pages with the perfect assimilation, the pithy fulness, the pregnant meditation, of De Tocqueville's book on the same subject. When we attempt to reduce M. Taine's chapters to a body of propositions standing out in definite relief from one another, yet conveying a certain unity of interpretation, we soon feel how possible it is for an author to have ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the Union was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but through the change of character it was bringing about in the people of the two sections, the same fatal change which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with strictly American subjects in the best criticism ever written upon De Tocqueville, where he shows conclusively the error of that great writer, in attributing to democracy, as such, many social phenomena which are equally observable under the English monarchy. These volumes also include—what the English edition of 1859 of course did not contain—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... not easy to resist the iron pressure of a tyrant; but, to our ancestors, it was far better than to accept the peace and profit which might follow abject submission. To borrow the words of De Tocqueville: "They cling to freedom for its native charms independent of its gifts,—the pleasure of speaking, acting, and breathing without restraint, under no master but God and the Law." The Englishmen of the first half of the seventeenth ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... go back to the beginning of this country, the great strength of America, as de Tocqueville pointed out when he came here a long time ago, has always been our ability to associate with people who were different from ourselves and to work together to find common ground. And in this day everybody has a responsibility to do more of that. We simply cannot wait for a tornado, a fire or ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was eighteen, they tell me, she was the prettiest girl in Pont du Sable, that is to say, she was prettier than Emilienne Daget at Bar la Rose, or than Berthe Pavoisier, the daughter of the miller at Tocqueville, who is now in Paris. At eighteen, Marianne was slim and blonde; moreover, she was as bold as a hawk, and smiled as easily as she lied. At twenty, she was rated as a valuable member of any fishing crew that put out from ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... which write themselves on the face of a continent and in the general well-being of a people, rather than in those more striking and commonly more disastrous events which attract the historian. We have been busy, thriving, and consequently, except to some few thoughtful people like De Tocqueville, profoundly uninteresting. We have been housekeeping; and why does the novelist always make his bow to the hero and heroine at the church-door, unless because he knows, that, if they are well off, nothing more is to be made of them? Prosperity is the forcing-house of mediocrity; and if we have ceased ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... before 1789, as for the notion, not less common, that there were no peasant proprietors in France before 1789. It is hardly excusable even that Mr. Carlyle, rhapsodising more than fifty years ago about the 'dumb despairing millions,' should have fallen into this error. For though De Tocqueville and Taine had not then exploded it in detail, Necker, in whose career Carlyle took so much interest, not only declared officially that there was 'an immense number' of such proprietors in France, but took the trouble ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... useful bonnet in England. Grote has to leave Paris after the coup d'etat, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the establishment of a Greek tyrant. Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampere all contribute to these pleasant pages. She seems to have inspired the warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her. Guizot writes to her: 'Madame de Stael ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... wife of the grandson of the eminent Hebraist, Mackintosh declared that she was the Madame Roland of Norwich. We owe to her Mrs. Austen and Lady Duff Gordon. Mr. Reeve, the translator of De Tocqueville's 'Democracy,' has preserved the memory of his father, Dr. Henry Reeve, by the republication of his 'Journal of a Tour on the Continent.' Let me also mention that Dr. Caius, the founder of Caius College, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... to know exactly what I mean by this, let him read the Memoir of De Tocqueville, whom I take to be the representative of the French ideal man; and certainly the kind of family life which his domestic letters disclose has a delicacy and a beauty which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... des ages democratiques, soyez-en sur, c'est la destruction ou l'affaiblissement excessif des parties du corps social en presence du tout. Tout ce qui releve de nos jours l'idee de l'individu est sain.—TOCQUEVILLE, 3rd January 1840, OEuvres, vii. 97. En France, il n'y a plus d'hommes. On a systematiquement tue l'homme au profit du people, des masses, comme disent nos legislateurs ecerveles. Puis un beau jour, on s'est apercu que ce people n'avait jamais ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... practice of a cult as a condition of political privileges" (l. c. p. 225). Yet "nobody in the United States believes that a man without religion might be an honest man" (l. c. p. 224). Yet North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamilton assure us with one voice. Meanwhile, the North American States only serve us as an example. The question is: What is the attitude of completed political emancipation towards religion? If even in the country ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx |
