Government

What experience and history teach is this, ... that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

The small progress we have made after four or five weeks close attendance and continual reasonings with each other … is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist.

Ne pas laisser vieillir les hommes doit être le grand art du gouvernement.