Edmund Burke: “Connivance is a relaxation from slavery, not a definition of liberty.”

It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue?

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.

They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.