In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function. - Edmund Burke

Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep, — to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy, — to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison.

If I cannot have reform without injustice, I will not have reform.

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.