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Who really said it

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom

Not his wording — and he wasn’t talking about Americans Alexis de Tocqueville 1805–1859 · French political thinker
Disputed Free to reuse

The idea is genuinely Tocqueville’s and it is easy to find: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter III. But he wrote it of the human heart, not of Americans — “there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality … and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.” The familiar one-liner compresses that sentence and swaps in a nation as its subject.

Last verified 6 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom” is a modern paraphrase, not Tocqueville’s wording. In Democracy in America, vol. 1 (trans. Henry Reeve; London: Saunders and Otley, 1835), ch. III, he wrote that a “depraved taste for equality … reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom” — a claim about the human heart, not about Americans. Verbatim: “There exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”

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Evoking the world of Alexis de Tocqueville — French magistrate, political thinker and author of Democracy in America. Theme: "Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The sentence he actually wrote

Primary source
Democracy in America, Volume I
First published
London: Saunders and Otley, 1835
Translation
Henry Reeve, 1835 — the standard English text
Location
Chapter III, “Social Condition of the Anglo-Americans” — section “Political Consequences of the Social Condition of the Anglo-Americans”

There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. ↑ Reeve’s 1835 translation, Volume I, Chapter III

The popular version squeezes this into one line and changes its subject. Tocqueville locates the impulse in “the human heart”; the quotation card locates it in Americans.

Full text
Read Volume I at Project Gutenberg
Democracy in America, Volume I — full text (Reeve translation)

How we verified this

  • Project Gutenberg’s full text of Volume I — Henry Reeve’s translation, from the London: Saunders and Otley edition of 1835 — carries the passage in Chapter III: a depraved taste for equality “reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”
  • In that same paragraph the subject is “the human heart,” and the sentence immediately after it says of democratic nations that “on the contrary, they have an instinctive love” of liberty — so reading the line as a verdict on Americans inverts the surrounding argument (Chapter III, Project Gutenberg).
  • Wikiquote’s Tocqueville page prints the genuine passage and appends the popular sentence beneath it under the note “Often misquoted as” — an independent record that the circulating wording is a misquotation rather than a translation variant.
  • A site search of Quote Investigator for this wording returns nothing — the specialists have not investigated this line, and the earliest wording we were able to confirm ourselves is Reeve’s 1835 translation above.
Public domain

Tocqueville’s French original and Henry Reeve’s English translation both date from 1835 and are long out of copyright in the United States; the complete text is distributed freely by Project Gutenberg.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What the popular version changes

Nobody is falsely credited here — the thought really is Tocqueville’s. What travels is a rewrite that tightens his sentence and, in tightening it, changes what it is about.

“Americans are so enamored of equality…” paraphrase

The compressed, quotable form found on quotation cards and in speeches. It is not Reeve’s wording, nor any translation wording we could locate; Wikiquote lists it explicitly as a misquotation of the passage below.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I (1835)

“… there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.” (Chapter III, Project Gutenberg)

“Americans” in place of “the human heart” meaning drift

Tocqueville is describing a temptation he thinks universal, in a chapter about what equality does to any society. The popular version turns a claim about human nature into a charge against one nation — which is why it reads as an insult, and why it is so often quoted as one (Chapter III, Project Gutenberg).

The honest version: Tocqueville did write that men can be reduced “to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom” — Democracy in America, Vol. I, Chapter III — but he said it of the human heart, not of Americans, and not in these words.

Context

Why the rewrite sticks

Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 to study its prisons and left convinced that the real story was equality — not as a slogan but as a solvent, dissolving rank and, with it, some of the ballast that had held liberty in place. Chapter III of Volume I is where he first states the danger plainly, and it is deliberately general: the appetite for levelling belongs to “the human heart,” everywhere.

The rewritten line is more useful than the original to anyone arguing about America, which is precisely why it spread. It converts a diagnosis of human nature into a verdict on a country, and it lends a nineteenth-century Frenchman’s authority to a modern complaint he did not make.

He wrote it about the human heart. The internet re-addressed the envelope.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Freedom Power Justice

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Democracy in America, Volume I (Reeve translation)gutenberg.org

The complete 1835 first volume in Henry Reeve’s English translation — the text quoted on this page.
Democracy in America, Volume IIgutenberg.org

The 1840 second volume, for readers checking whether a line belongs to the later half of the work.
Alexis de Tocqueville — sourced quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s Tocqueville page, including its Misattributed section and its notes on commonly misquoted lines.
Democracy in Americaen.wikipedia.org

Background on the book’s composition, its two volumes, and its publication history.
Democracy in America, Volume 1en.wikisource.org

A second free transcription of the Reeve translation, useful for cross-checking wording.
Alexis de Tocquevilleen.wikipedia.org

Biography: the 1831 American journey, the two volumes, and his later career.

The author

About Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville

1805–1859 · French magistrate, political thinker and author of Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville sailed for the United States in 1831 as a young French magistrate nominally studying American prisons, and came home with something far larger: De la démocratie en Amérique, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Its subject is not really America but equality — what a society gains and what it risks when rank dissolves. Henry Reeve’s English translation appeared alongside the French, and it is Reeve’s wording that most English quotations of Tocqueville ultimately descend from, however far they have since drifted.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Vol. 1. Translated by Henry Reeve. London: Saunders and Otley, 1835. Chapter III, “Social Condition of the Anglo-Americans.”

This verification page

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