Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is … - Alexis de Tocqueville

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Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. 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.

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About Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859) was a French political thinker and historian, most famous for his work Democracy in America.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Tocqueville Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville Alexis Clérel de Tocqueville Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
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Shorter versions of this quote

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.

A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.

Additional quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville

Under wage labor, the art advances, the artisan declines.

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

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I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.

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