Edmund Burke: “He never robs from the loose superfluity of standing greatness; he devours the fallen, the indigent, the necessitous.”

Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?

But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.

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

If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.