Edmund Burke: “I am quite convinced that they are the honestest public men that ever appeared in this country, and I am sure that they…”

Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.

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.

The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable.

This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.