If you don't bring him up, no one else will.
The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.Īnd don't worry, Tocqueville rarely comes up in everyday conversation. to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.
Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration.ĭemocratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. Here's a couple from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations:Īmerica is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.
Moreover, by looking up "Tocqueville" in any good book of quotes, you can pick up enough brilliant sayings to hold you. Eight hundred pages long, but good luck getting through the first 100.
But the other product of his trip, Democracy in America, is considered a classic-an astute picture of American life, as relevant today as when the first edition was published in France in 1835. He also wanted to see "what a great republic is like." Tocqueville's report on American prisons is largely forgotten. Alexis de Tocqueville on Transportation in AmericaĪlexis de Tocqueville is best known for Democracy in America, which he wrote after spending 10 months of 18 in the United States on a mission from France to study American prisons (then considered progressive).
0 kommentar(er)
