Thomas Paine

If everything that can happen is already in precedent, legislation is at an end, and precedent, like a dictionary, determines every case.

How is it that the same persons who would proudly be thought wiser than their predecessors, appear at the same time only as the ghosts of departed wisdom?

Either the doctrine of precedents is policy to keep a man in a state of ignorance, or it is a practical confession that wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age, and can only hobble along by the stilts and crutches…

In numerous instances, the precedent ought to operate as a warning, and not as an example, and requires to be shunned instead of imitated; but instead of this, precedents are taken in the lump, and put at once for constitution and for law.

Government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up.

The ragged relic and the antiquated precedent, the monk and the monarch, will moulder together.

This political popery, like the ecclesiastical popery of old, has had its day, and is hastening to its exit.

They feel that he is arriving at knowledge faster than they wish, and their policy of precedents is the barometer of their fears.

They are softly leading him to the sepulchre of precedents, to deaden his faculties and call attention from the scene of revolutions.

Governments now act as if they were afraid to awaken a single reflection in man.

But by associating those precedents with a superstitious reverence for ancient things, as monks show relics and call them holy, the generality of mankind are deceived into the design.

The generality of those precedents are founded on principles and opinions, the reverse of what they ought; and the greater distance of time they are drawn from, the more they are to be suspected.