Walter Bagehot: “The Americans now extol their institutions, and so defraud themselves of their due praise.”

Perhaps such powers as these are what a wise man would most seek to exercise and least fear to possess.

In early society, originality in life was forbidden and repressed by the fixed rule of life.

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