Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 70:
Men often oppose a thing, merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike. But if they have been consulted, and have happened to disapprove, opposition then becomes, in their estimation, an indispensable duty of self-love. They seem to think themselves bound in honor, and by all the motives of personal infallibility, to defeat the success of what has been resolved upon contrary to their sentiments.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Ideals and Doubts, in Collected Legal Papers 303, 305 (1920), quoted in Michael Boudin’s review of a volume of Louis Brandeis’s letters, 85 Yale L. J. 591, 596 (1976):
[T]he mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort. . . . And although with Spinoza we may regard criticism of the past as futile, there is every reason for doing all that we can to make the future such as we desire.
Samuel Bray
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