“The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.”

— Alexis De Tocqueville , book Democracy in America

Book One, Chapter XVI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One

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 "The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas t…" by Alexis De Tocqueville?

Alexis De Tocqueville 135

French political thinker and historian 1805–1859

Related quotes

“In this time of the great struggle for a new art we fight like disorganized 'savages' against an old, established power. The battle seems to be unequal, but spiritual matters are never decided by numbers, only by the power of ideas. The dreaded weapons of the 'savages' are their new ideas. New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was thought to be indestructible.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

1911 - 1914, The 'Savages' of Germany' (1912)

“It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.”

Voltaire Le Siècle de Louis XIV

"Siècle de Louis XIV," ch. 32 (1751), qtd. in Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," Criticism of the Kantian philosophy (1818)
Citas
Original: (fr) C'est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de faire impunément de grandes fautes.

“The seventeenth century witnessed the birth of modern science as we know it today. The science was something new, based on a direct confrontation of nature by experiment and observation. But there was another feature of the new science—a dependence on numbers, on real numbers of actual experience.
…The ancients knew a few numerical laws… But prior to the Scientific Revolution, the goal of science (or the study of nature) was not to seek laws of nature expressed in terms of numbers or number relations. …the new science …not only found laws based on numbers but they were also willing to express these laws in terms of higher powers of numbers—squares and cubes.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (2005)

“Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations of their minds.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist

"Thomson & Tait's Natural Philosophy" in Nature, Vol. 7 (Mar. 27, 1873) A review of Elements of Natural Philosophy https://archive.org/details/elementsnatural00kelvgoog (1873) by Sir W. Thomson, P. G. Tait. See Nature, Vol. 7-8, https://archive.org/details/nature7818721873lock Nov. 1872-Oct. 1873, pp. 399-400, or The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 328. https://books.google.com/books?id=lzlRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA328

“That is the great thing about our movement--that these members are uniform not only in ideas, but even, the facial expression is almost the same!”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Attributed by Jack Kirby in The Forever People #3, National Periodical Publications, (June-July 1971).
Disputed

“An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Incoherency of New Ideas
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
Context: An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better.