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Alexis de Tocqueville
“However, not only are fortunes equal in America, equality extends to some degree to intelligence itself. I do not think that there is a single country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few ignorant and, at the same time, so few educated individuals as in America. Primary education is available to all; secondary is within reach of no one, which can be explained quite easily as the inevitable result, so to speak, of my argument above. Almost all Americans enjoy a life of comfort and can, therefore, obtain the first elements of human knowledge. In America there are few rich people; therefore, all Americans have to learn the skills of a profession which demands a period of apprenticeship. Thus America can devote to general learning only the early years of life. At fifteen, they begin a career; their education ends most often when ours begins. If education is pursued beyond that point, it is directed only towards specialist subjects with a profitable return in mind. Science is studied as if it were a job and only those branches are taken up which have a recognized and immediate usefulness.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Marjane Satrapi
“I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.”
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Alexis de Tocqueville
“Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science;”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Barack Obama
“We’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.”
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Alexis de Tocqueville
“The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the play things of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. After having exhausted all the different modes of election without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they notice did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

179584 Our Shared Shelf — 223040 members — last activity Feb 04, 2026 04:05AM
OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Dear Readers, As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading ...more
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