Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

You can't legislate morality.

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.

A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.

Laws are often made to express collective ethical principles, to establish a climate of opinion …

The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.

Have you no morals, man?' 'Can't afford them,Governor.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

There are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law.

Laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.

Virtue and decency are so nearly related that it is difficult to separate them from each other but in our imagination.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

As long as the decent people refuse to believe that morality must manifest itself in every sphere of human activity, including the political, they will not meet the challenge of Marxism.

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, … a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.