Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.

I think our Western society is very much about, 'Tuck your head in; make sure you're safe. Don't rock the boat.'

I'm an old-fashioned girl, and I didn't believe in living with people, so I guess I married for the wrong reasons at times.

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

When people are used to you doing something, they want you to stay in that lane.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

I am a Conservative, so I don't wish to be seen as a rebel, particularly, at all.

You can be a sophisticated person and still have really old ideas about what love is supposed to look like.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.

Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice...it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous.

We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.

The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.

We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

You will never change anything that you are willing to tolerate.

The terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.

New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let em be unmanly), yet are followed.