Thus the principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.
 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840). copy citation

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Author Alexis de Tocqueville
Source Democracy in America
Topic equality imagination
Date 1840
Language English
Reference
Note Translated by Henry Reeve
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm

Context

“All men who live in democratic ages more or less contract the ways of thinking of the manufacturing and trading classes; their minds take a serious, deliberate, and positive turn; they are apt to relinquish the ideal, in order to pursue some visible and proximate object, which appears to be the natural and necessary aim of their desires. Thus the principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth. No men are less addicted to reverie than the citizens of a democracy; and few of them are ever known to give way to those idle and solitary meditations which commonly precede and produce the great emotions of the heart.” source
Original quote

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