Walter Bagehot: “The use of a fresh mind applied to the official mind is not only a corrective use, it is also an animating use.”

The whole history of civilisation, is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

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.

The United States could not have become monarchical, even if the Constitutional Convention had decreed it, even if the component States had ratified it.