Walter Bagehot: “How to get the obedience of men is the hard problem; what you do with that obedience is less critical.”

They are above corruption because they are the corruptors.

Now it is not conceivable that a race of beings with valuable instincts supporting their existence and supplying their wants would need these simple tools.

If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.

Nothing promotes intellect like intellectual discussion, and nothing promotes intellectual discussion so much as government by discussion.