The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.
More Quotes from Alexis 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
The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.
Alexis Tocqueville
When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, if afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.
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 living
Alexis Tocqueville
There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation to start a war and to end it.
Alexis Tocqueville
By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs then their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.
Alexis Tocqueville
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If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
Edward Bond
But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.
Tobias Wolff