Edmund Burke: “But, oh, the blindness of the greatest statesman to the infinite and unlooked-for combinations of things which lie hid…”

Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.

An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease.

We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.

When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.