By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.
More Quotes from Alexis Tocqueville:
For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of livingAlexis Tocqueville
In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.
Alexis Tocqueville
Countries, therefore, when lawmaking falls exclusively to the lot of the poor cannot hope for much economy in public expenditure expenses will always be considerable, either because taxes cannot touch those who vote for them or because they are asse
Alexis Tocqueville
Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
Alexis Tocqueville
It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.
Alexis Tocqueville
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it
Alexis Tocqueville
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
Based on Topics: Books Quotes, Democracy Quotes, Imagination & Visualization Quotes, Literature Quotes, Mind Quotes, Sense & Perception Quotes, Thought & Thinking Quotes, Wit QuotesBased on Keywords: commoner, erudition, fecundity, overburdened, untutored
It's good Xerox is known for its copying machines, and it's good Jim Carrey is known for comedy.
Steve Guttenberg
I always want to do things that are different. I don't want to be doing the same thing, the same performance constantly, and it feels like most people tell you that they are the same. However different you feel might approach them.
Jeremy Northam
So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
Paul Farmer