The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.

Free government is self-government. A government of the people by the people. The best government of this sort is that which the people think best.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agree…

In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions.

In order to ameliorate without commotion new institutions must be made, as it were, to rise out of those which the barbarism of centuries has consecrated. It w…

Clearly, the need for political and economic reform was now felt more widely in the country at large. Another, more obscure process, traceable to the flexibili…