“Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.”

“I didn't want to be an immigrant. I was forced to be an immigrant. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, said that the powerful and the happy never go into exile. He was right.”

“When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.”

“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.”

“Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.”

“No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure.”

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”

“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”

“A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.”

“In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.”

“There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.”