The French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference.

No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure.

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.

We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.

Better use has been made of association and this powerful instrument of action has been applied for more varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world.

Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.