The Old Regime and the French Revolution Quotes.

1. "The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

2. "Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

3. "They took over from the old order not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

4. "French sought reforms before liberties... They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good... They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind… Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government... French nation is prepared to tolerate in a government, that favors and flatters its desire for equality, practices and principles that are, in fact, the tools of despotism."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

5. "One's love for despotism is in exact proportion to one's contempt for one's country."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

6. "Despotism alone can provide that atmosphere of secrecy which favors crooked dealing and enables the freebooters of finance to make illicit fortunes."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

7. "Centralization and socialism are products of the same soil. The one is to the other what the cultivated fruit is to the wild stock."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

8. "Provincial liberties can subsist for a time without national liberty when those liberties are ancient and linked to habit, mores, and memories, while despotism is new. But it is unreasonable to think that one can create local liberties at will or even maintain them for long if general liberty is suppressed."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

9. "People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name socialism are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

10. "People sought reforms, not rights. Had the throne then been occupied by a monarch of the calibre and character of Frederick the Great, I have no doubt he would have accomplished many of the reforms which were brought about by the Revolution; and that not only without endangering his throne, but with a large gain of power."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution