Walter Bagehot: “What were the chances against a person of Lincoln's antecedents, elected as he was, proving to be what he was?”

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

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.

Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens.