“A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.”

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.

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….