L'ancien Régime Et La Révolution

“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“They took over from the old order not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“One's love for despotism is in exact proportion to one's contempt for one's country.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“French sought reforms before liberties... They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good... They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind… Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government... French nation is prepared to tolerate in a government, that favors and flatters its desire for equality, practices and principles that are, in fact, the tools of despotism.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“Centralization and socialism are products of the same soil. The one is to the other what the cultivated fruit is to the wild stock.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.””

— Alexis de Tocqueville