Edmund Burke: “A purposed neglect, or, what is worse, a literal, but perverse and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest…”

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

They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.

I think our happy situation owing to our Constitution,--but owing to the whole of it, and not to any part singly,--owing in a great measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews and reformations, as well as to what we have…

Whatever they are, I wish my countrymen rather to recommend to our neighbors the example of the British Constitution than to take models from them for the improvement of our own.