Edmund Burke: “Arbitrary power, my Lords, is always a miserable creature.”

This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.

Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…

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.

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.