Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes About Eyes

Quotes about: Eyes

• What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Sleep, Eye, Thinking

• The first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unfortunate races have neither birth, nor face, nor language, nor mores in common; only their misfortunes look alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same author for them.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Country, Eye, Men

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2012). “Democracy in America”, p.303, University of Chicago Press

• The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Eye, Anxiety, Want

  'Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835' 18 May

• America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not attempted to do. - from Democracy in America

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Change, Eye, Men

  Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, Patrick Renshaw (1998). “Democracy in America”, p.167, Wordsworth Editions

• Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Mother, Children, Struggle

  "Democracy in America". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville. Chapter II, 1835.

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