Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be fro… - Edmund Burke

[T]he zealous never fail to draw political inferences from religious tenets, by which they interest the magistrate in the dispute; and then to the heat of a religious fervour is added the fury of a party zeal. All intercourse is cut off between the parties. They lose all knowledge of each other, tho' countrymen and neighbours, and are therefore easily imposed upon with the most absurd stories concerning each other's opinions and practices. They judge of the hatred of the adverse side by their own. Then fear is added to their hatred; and preventive injuries arise from their fear. The remembrance of the past, the dread of the future, the present ill, will join together to urge them forward to the most violent courses.
Such is the manner of proceeding of religious parties towards each other.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never wholly new. . . .