SIX FROM DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

— “It was never assumed in the United States that the citizen of a free country has a right to do whatever he pleases; on the contrary, social obligations were there imposed upon him more various than anywhere else.”

— “It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.”

    — “Among democratic nations, men easily attain a certain equality of condition, but they can never attain as much as they desire.  It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on.  At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold.  They are near enough to see its charms but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die.”

— “Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.”

— “Americans owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus democracy throws [a man] back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

— “It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet are in such a rush to snatch any that come within their reach, as if expecting to stop living before they have relished them. They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose their grip as they hurry after some new delight.”