Sublime

By introducing the jury into the business of the courts you are enabled to diminish the number of judges, which is a very great advantage. When judges are very numerous, death is perpetually thinning the ranks of the judicial functionaries, and laying places vacant for newcomers. The ambition of the magistrates is therefore continually excited, and

In a community in which lawyers are allowed to occupy, without opposition, that high station which naturally belongs to them, their general spirit will be eminently conservative and anti-democratic.

The tyranny of the Legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come.

not because he is inferior to the authorities which conduct it, or that he is less capable than his neighbor of governing himself, but because he acknowledges the utility of an association with his fellow-men, and because he knows that no such association can exist without a regulating force.

as the number of persons by whose assistance they may rise is comparatively small, the government is, if I may use the expression, put up to a sort of auction. In democracies, on the contrary, those who are covetous of power are very seldom wealthy, and the number of citizens who confer that power is extremely great. Perhaps in democracies the numb

Whilst the kings were ruining themselves by their great enterprises, and the nobles exhausting their resources by private wars, the lower orders were enriching themselves by commerce.

In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.

Il est éclairé par la comparaison entre la France, où le pouvoir royal s’est révélé incapable de s’adapter à la montée en puissance de l’égalité, et les États-Unis, qui se sont construits autour d’elle, en rupture avec les sociétés d’ordre européennes. Pour Tocqueville, il ne fait pas de doute que la démocratie représente le futur et que la vision

Why a democratic people is less capable of sustained effort than another.