Democracy

“The means of democracy are therefore more imperfect than those of aristocracy: often it works against itself, without wanting to; but its goal is more useful” (222).

“the great privilege of the Americans is to be able to have repairable mistakes” (222).

“The real advantage of democracy is not, as has been said, to favour the prosperity of all, but only to serve the well-being of the greatest number” (223).

“Those charged with directing the affairs of the public in the United States are often inferior in capacity and morality to the men that aristocracy would bring to power; but their interest intermingles and is identified with that of the majority of their fellow citizens. They can therefore commit frequent infidelities and grave errors, but they will never systematically follow a tendency hostile to that majority; and they cannot succeed in impressing an exclusive and dangerous style on the government” (223).

“Thus it can happen that in aristocratic governments public men do evil without wanting to, and in democracies they produce good without having any thought of doing so” (224).

“Allow the human mind to follow its tendency and it will regulate political society and the divine city in a uniform manner; it will seek, if I dare say it, to harmonize the earth with Heaven” (275).

“Each sect therefore adores God in its manner, but all sects preach the same morality in the name of God” (278).

“as he [the American] arrives at happiness through regularity of life, he becomes habituated to regulating his opinions as well as his tastes without difficulty” (279).

“While the European seeks to escape his domestic sorrows by troubling society, the American draws from his home the love of order, which he afterwards brings into affairs of state” (279).

“Religion, which, among Americans, never mixes directly in the government of society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates their use of it” (280).

“This it is that in the United States religious zeal constantly warms itself at the hearth of patriotism” (281).

“Americans, on the contrary, almost always carry the habits of public life into private life. Among them the idea of the jury is discovered in school games, and one finds parliamentary forms even in the ordering of a banquet” (292).

“I think there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States” (403).

“they possess a certain philosophic method, whose rules they have never taken the trouble to define, that is common to all of them” (403).

“To escape from the spirit of the system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions, and, up to a certain point, from national prejudices; to take tradition only as information, and current facts only as useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for a result without letting themselves be chained to the means, and to see through the form to the foundation: these are the principle features that characterize what I shall call the philosophic method of the Americans” (403).

“America is therefore the only country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed” (403).

“Each therefore withdraws narrowly into himself and claims to judge the world from there” (404).

“Thus they willingly deny what they cannot comprehend: that gives them little faith in the extraordinary and an almost invincible distaste for the supernatural” (404).

“In the United States, Christian sects vary infinitely and are constantly modified, but Christianity itself is an established and irresistible fact” (406).

“Men are no longer bound except by interests, not by ideas; and one could say that human opinions form no more than a sort of intellectual dust that is blown around on all sides and cannot gather and settle” (406).

“Dogmatic beliefs are more or less numerous according to the times. They are born in different manners and can change form and object; but one cannot make it so that there are no dogmatic beliefs, that is, opinions men receive on trust without discussing them” (407).

“There is no philosopher in the world so great that he does not believe a million things on faith in others or does not suppose many more truths than he establishes” (408).

“Individual independence can be more or less great; it cannot be boundless” (408).

“As citizens become more equal and alike, the penchant of each to believe blindly a certain man or class diminishes. The disposition to believe the mass is augmented, and more and more it is opinion that leads the world” (409).

“In times of equality, because of their similarity, men have no faith in one another; but this same similarity gives them an almost unlimited trust in the judgement of the public” (409).

“I see very clearly two tendencies in equality: one brings the mind of each man toward new thoughts, and the other would willingly induce it to give up thinking” (410).

“more than kings and less than men” (665).