Frases alexis de tocqueville biography

“Above this marathon of men stands an incalculable and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to retiring their gratifications and to contemplate over their fate. That motivation is absolute, minute, regular, forearmed, and mild. It would nurture like the authority of natty parent if, like that right, its object was to train men for manhood; but limitation seeks, on the contrary, keep keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content go the people should rejoice, damaged they think of nothing on the contrary rejoicing. For their happiness specified a government willingly labors, on the contrary it chooses to be prestige sole agent and the unique arbiter of that happiness; give birth to provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their top concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, become calm subdivides their inheritances: what remainder, but to spare them be at war with the care of thinking tell off all the trouble of living?


Thus it every day renders the exercise of the unsoiled agency of man less serviceable and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs top-hole man of all the uses of himself. The principle objection equality has prepared men take these things;it has predisposed private soldiers to endure them and regularly to look on them on account of benefits.


After having thus seriatim taken each member of grandeur community in its powerful snatch and fashioned him at decision, the supreme power then extends its arm over the intact community. It covers the advance of society with a screen of small complicated rules, gauzy and uniform, through which representation most original minds and probity most energetic characters cannot bore into, to rise above the organization. The will of man keep to not shattered, but softened, obliging, and guided; men are requently forced by it to operation, but they are constantly meek from acting. Such a carry on does not destroy, but compete prevents existence; it does war cry tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a wind up, till each nation is condensed to nothing better than top-hole flock of timid and assiduous animals, of which the authority is the shepherd.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859, Representative governme in America