Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.

It is a maxim that no man was ever enslaved by influence while he was fit to be free.

Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.

Just as man must have liberty to think and speak, so he must have liberty in food, dress, and marriage, and in every other thing, so long as he does not injure others.

Life is fairer when individuals are free to make their own decisions

Happiness is the freedom of choice. The freedom to choose where to live, what to do, what to buy, what to sell, from whom, to whom, when and how.

All I'm for is the liberty of the individual.

Why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience?

I believe everybody got the right to live their own life the way they want to.

I firmly believe in individual liberty more than anything else. And that you have to live the life you want for yourself.

By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.

The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.

To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.

I was not born to be forced.

We’re not so free that we don’t have to listen to rules, and laws, and regulations. Those are important. But the spirit, the freedom of the spirit, that’s what I think of American Dream, that we are free here to do what we want to do, what we set out to do.

This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one's happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It's only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that is what makes the crucial difference.

My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling and action of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending and maintaining that liberty

It is far better to be free to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else

I do esteem individual liberty above everything.

I find freedom to be the most important issue facing any human being today, because without freedom, then life is pointless. The more dependent you become on centralized power, the more easily you are lead around.

Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.