“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.”
More from Tocqueville on Democracy
Others on Democracy
Sir Winston Churchill
3 quotes“it is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.”
Woodrow Wilson
3 quotes“I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.”
Thomas Jefferson
2 quotes“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other f...”
H. L. Mencken
2 quotes“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
Barack Obama
2 quotes“When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democrac...”
Robert Heinlein
1 quote“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?”
E.B. White
1 quote“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”
Theodore Roosevelt
1 quote“The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them inpractical fashion.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
1 quote“Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.”
Gilbert Chesterton
1 quote“Democracy means government by the uneducated while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”
G.K. Chesterton
1 quote“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”
Gloria Steinem
1 quote“Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democ...”