Edmund Burke: “The Rajah had retired to the last refuge of the afflicted, to offer up prayers to his God and our God, when a vile…”

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.

When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.

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?