An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious, if it injures the conscience it is criminal.

Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.

The test of political institutions is the condition of the country whose future they regulate.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.

Wise and prudent men-intelligent conservatives-have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or an idea, but is really some stronger material force.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.