Edmund Burke: “Leave a man to his passions, and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”

But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators.

The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.

Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly, and as it were by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness?

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