The history of empires is the history of human misery. - Edward Gibbon

The army is the only order of men sufficiently united to concur in the same sentiments, and powerful enough to impose them on the rest of their fellow-citizens; but the temper of soldiers, habituated at once to violence and to slavery, renders them very unfit guardians of a legal, or even a civil constitution.

[I]n this rage against slavery, in the numerous petitions against the Slave trade was there no leaven of new democratical principles, no wild ideas of the rights and natural equality of man? It is these I fear.

My own choice has indeed transported me into a foreign land, but I am truly attached from interest and inclination to my native country: and even as a Citizen of the World, I wish the stability of England, the sole great refuge of mankind against the opposite mischiefs of despotism and democracy.