Quote:

---

Perpetual childhood

“A society which tries to keep its citizens in ‘perpetual childhood’: it will seek to preserve their happiness, but it chooses to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness. Society will develop a new type of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate … it does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.”
-Alex de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America

---