Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.

The three main sources of scepticism are first, that not every people desires freedom; second, that democracy in certain parts of the world would be dangerous; and third, that there is little the world's democracies can do to advance freedom outside their countries.

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

Routine is a declivity down which many governments slide, and routine says that freedom of the press is dangerous.

Free nations of the world cannot allow Taiwan, a beacon of democracy, to be subdued by an authoritarian China.

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.

The United States is the only country left now, bar Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, that has this all-government system.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

The conservation of monarchy in any portion of South America will tend to break the shock of that inevitable divorce by which the New World is about to be divided by the Old... But as to putting it forward, as a project or proposition of ours, that is out of the question. Monarchy in Mexico, and monarchy in Brazil, would cure the evils of universal democracy, and prevent the drawing of the line which I almost dread – America versus Europe. The United States, naturally enough, aim at this division and cherish the democracy which leads to it.

…the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire, which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control.

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.

Big is bad - the corollary of Schumacher's small is beautiful. The centralized state, particularly the mass-society state of the 20th century, is inherently a failure: it is authoritarian and anti-liberty, imposing checks and laws on all individual actions; it is hierarchical and arbitrary, with power at the top and subservience for the great majority below; it is bureaucratic in order to function at all, but it functions poorly nonetheless because bureaucracies are always inefficient and clumsy and self-perpetuating; it is undemocratic, because it is too big to allow direct face-to-face decision making and substitutes various forms of representation, all of which take power from the individual.

The ultimate failures of dictatorship cost humanity far more than the temporary failures of democracy.

Authoritarianism provides a kind of negative stability. Democracy creates space to do a lot of things, sometimes bad things, dangerous things.

Where nationalism is the main issue, the demand for democracy always takes second place.

America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.

Institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.

The main difference in the conceptual framework of a democracy as compared to various Asian regimes is that these regimes do not accept equality as the fundamental basis of their societies …. It is no exaggeration to say that equality is being treated as an alien concept by a large section of the elite in Asia

America's objective today should be to try to make herself the best possible mirror of democracy that she can. The people of the world can see what happens here. They watch us to see what we are going to do and how well we can do it. We are giving them the only possible picture of democracy that we can: the picture as it works in actual practice. This is the only way other peoples can see for themselves how it works; and can determine for themselves whether this thing is good in itself, whether it is better than they have, better than what other political and economic systems offer them.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both….

If you go and live with these Arabs, you will find that they cannot understand our ideas of freedom and human dignity. They have lived so long under dictatorships of one kind or another, how can we expect them to run successfully a free government?

People mistake majoritarianism for democracy.

Our liberty cannot depend on the good intention of those in power.