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

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.

Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.

A history that should pursue all the subtle threads from end to end might be eminently valuable, but not as a tribute to peace and conciliation.

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.