Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

The government is just the people acting together.

The essential thing is the formation of the public will of the nation. That is the starting point for political action.

In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together, and from awakening a mutual excitement which prompts sudden and passionate resolutions. Cities may be looked upon as large assemblies, of which all the inhabitants are members; their populace exercises a prodigious influence upon the magistrates, and frequently executes its own wishes without their intervention.

We are the people and America is really nothing without the people. We have to take control and we have realize as young people that this is our future. We have to live here and this where we'll one day raise our own children.

The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.

Ordinary people can bring about change.

During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.... The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy.

Instead of engaging on the merits and saying, "Well, we want an open border, you know, we really do," and that's all good for America because they know the people will reject that, they [the elites] attack Donald Trump as an extremist, which I think is unfair.

What I can say is, is that if you do a poll, and one of the worldwide polling companies did this, and they asked people in 50 countries, "Would you like to come to America," it's about 700 million would come next year. We would double our population.

There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

If you ask every American out there what kind of a people we are, we would all say, "Oh, we're really good people. We do good things in the world." Then you go around the world and ask what America is like, there's a completely different conceptualization of what we are.

With 300 million people in America, you can fail to impress 299 million of them and still go platinum.

I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.

We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

We want to make nation-building a people's movement.

It is not in the United Nations that the Millennium Development Goals will be achieved. They have to be achieved in each of its Member States, by the joint efforts of their governments and people.

The throne we honour is the people's choice.

I'm not going to waste my time trying 'break' America, you know what I mean? Too many people have died trying to break America. America doesn't break unless it wants to.

We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.

Chile has changed. The people have become more mature and they are more conscious of their rights. They want to participate and have a say about things such as if and where a power plant can be built.

In America, we will have a government of, by and for the people.

History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.

I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.

When you have people together who believe in something very strongly - whether it's religion or politics or unions - things happen.