Thomas Burke (1777):unlimited power cannot be safety trusted to any man or set of men on earth

“The more experience I acquire, the stronger is my conviction that unlimited power cannot be safety trusted to any man or set of men on earth. No men have undertaken to exercise authority with intention more generous and disinterested than the Congress…. [How} could individuals blessed with peaceable domestic affluence… endeavor at increasing the power with which they are invested, when their tenure of it must be exceedingly dangerous and precarious…? This is a question I believe cannot be answered but by a plain declaration that power of all kinds has an irresistible propensity to increase desire for itself. It gives the passion of ambition a velocity which increases in its progress, and this is a passion which grows in proportion as it is gratified.” –Thomas Burke (1777)