Edmund Burke: “If you and I find our talents not of the great and ruling kind, our conduct, at least, is conformable to our faculties.”

They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs,--as a benefit, not as a grievance,--as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude.

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.

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?

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.