Edmund Burke: “If men were allowed to credit themselves upon such principles, any one might soon grow rich by this mode of accounting.”

The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.

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.

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.