Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

Decadence is wonderful.

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

Los Angeles, I don't like that town. Too decadent, and it's slimy.

There are certain seasons in the course of human affairs, when Genius, Virtue, and Patriotism, seems to nod over the vices of the times.

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

As a youth, I sought out decadence; as an elder, I try to avoid decay.

It is but a step from companionship to slavery when one associates with vice.

The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

Now we suffer the evils of a long peace; luxury more cruel than war broods over us and avenges a conquered world.

Vices of the time; vices of the man.

Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion.

History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.

I have said many times in the past I don't choose to be vice president, either Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or vegetarian.

Whatever vices and corruptions men see in the lives of their ministers will not be attributed to the depravity of their old nature which still abides in them, but to the gospel.

A corrupt society is terrible for humanity and great for business.

It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught.

Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class, of the class to which he himself belongs, who'toil not neither do they spin'.

two things do me in: one's chocolate cake, the other's hypocrisy.

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.