After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
More Quotes from Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville:
Despotism may govern without faith, but Liberty cannot.Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.
Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.
Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
America is a country where they have freedom of speech but everyone says the same thing.
Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.
Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
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