Historical voices

We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men.

The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise.

By a slow, but well-sustained progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at.

Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means.

It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance; but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate.

He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.

The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility.

But it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting confidence are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator.

It is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow, and in some cases almost imperceptible.

At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing.

Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination, in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations.

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.

Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as He loves us better too.

We must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect the errors of those who are timid and doubtful of themselves with regard to points wherein the happiness of mankind is concerned.

The public interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance: I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial.

There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns.

The sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to criticize on the use that is made of it, with less awe and reverence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority.

To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding.

To make a revolution is a measure which, primâ fronte, requires an apology.

But they will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices and sinister…