Edmund Burke: “Our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law is no more…”

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.

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.

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

If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular.