Edmund Burke: “Our Constitution is not made for great, general, and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or…”

The prattling about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment of a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder.

There are some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule, and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it.

I would not exclude alteration neither; but even when I changed, it should be to preserve.

To keep a balance between the power of acquisition on the part of the subject and the demands he is to answer on the part of the state is the fundamental part of the skill of a true politician.