Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.

With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs.

Of all the countries of the world America is the one where the movement of thought and human industry is the most continuous and swift.

I shall not fear to say that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me of all the philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee against themselves that remains to them. The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary.