“There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”

— Alexis De Tocqueville , book Democracy in America

Often misquoted as: Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter I-V, Chapter III, Part I

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This…" by Alexis De Tocqueville?

Alexis De Tocqueville 135

French political thinker and historian 1805–1859

Related quotes

“The bestowing upon men equality of rights, is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak. It begets the grossest inequalities of condition.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 233

“Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 29
The True Believer (1951), Part Two: The Potential Converts

“Where are the real sources of human dignity, freedom and modern democracy, if not in the concept of infinity to which all men are equal?”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Discours de réception de Louis Pasteur (1882)
Original: Où sont les vraies sources de la dignité humaine, de la liberté et de la démocratie moderne, sinon dans la notion de l’infini devant laquelle tous les hommes sont égaux?

“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal — there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J. P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 20
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

Le désir du privilège et le goût de l'égalité, passions dominantes et contradictoires des Français de toute époque.
in La France et son armée.
Writings

“I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter I.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

“The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Context: The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

“When we talk of the equality of man, we find, also, a challenge and an opportunity; a challenge to breathe new life into the ideals enshrined in the Charter, an opportunity to bring men closer to freedom and true equality. and thus, closer to a love of peace.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address to the United Nations (1963)
Context: When we talk of the equality of man, we find, also, a challenge and an opportunity; a challenge to breathe new life into the ideals enshrined in the Charter, an opportunity to bring men closer to freedom and true equality. and thus, closer to a love of peace.
The goal of the equality of man which we seek is the antithesis of the exploitation of one people by another with which the pages of history and in particular those written of the African and Asian continents, speak at such length.
Exploitation, thus viewed, has many faces. But whatever guise it assumes, this evil is to be shunned where it does not exist and crushed where it does.

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson book Ulysses

Source: Ulysses (1842), l. 63-70
Context: It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

“Despite the absence of physical equality in nature, political systems engage in grand endeavors to dictate perfection and equality in a universe devoid of both. In their egalitarian and quixotic quest to redistribute wealth, they rob Peter to pay Paul, which only creates a state of dependency, not of equality. Any attempt to impose equality can only bring about more inequality. Rev. William J. H. Boetcker expressed this same insight in 1916, writing, 'You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 72

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Alexis De Tocqueville 135

Related quotes

Related topics