"A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life."

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

"The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind."

"The great difficulty in the way of the progress of any reform is always not the 'difficulty of the thing itself,' but the difficulty of getting people to believe in the difficulty of the thing itself."

"Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professe…"