“There should be a law to the People besides its own will.”

If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power…power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being.

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge.

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous.

The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded.

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play.

But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power….

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.

Far rather would I sit and sew beside my poor mother, for this thing is not of my condition.

I don’t believe in dying. It’s been done. I’m working on a new exit. Besides, I can’t die now – I’m booked.

All I know how to do is take what’s on my mind and spit it out funny. I don’t know what else I could do besides comedy.

Besides… next to giving pain my favourite sport’s to feel it.

Besides the mistakes that are pointed out, I love the way readers become involved with the characters.

I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.