“Among the legislative classes embodied into, and constituting the government, we must place the landed aristocracy. In fact, the landed aristocracy and the government are one—the latter being nothing more than the organized means of preserving the power and privileges of the former.”

Diary (23 July 1851)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)
Context: Is there anything in which the people of this age and country differ more from those of other lands and former times than in this — their ability to preserve order and protect rights without the aid of government? … We are realizing the paradox, “that country is governed best which is governed least.” I no longer fear lynch law. Let the people be intelligent and good, and I am not sure but their impulsive, instinctive verdicts and sentences and executions, unchecked by the rules and technicalities of law, are more likely to be according to substantial justice than the decisions of courts and juries.

Principles of Communism (1847)

Jedes Zeitalter wird, wenn es historischen Rang hat, von Aristokratien gestaltet.
Aristokratie = die Besten herrschen.
Niemals regieren Völker sich selbst. Diesen Wahnsinn hat der Liberalismus erfunden. Hinter seiner Volkssouveränität verstecken sich nur die gerissensten Schelme, die nicht erkannt sein wollen.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
Context: There is an unnatural unfitness in an aristocracy to be legislators for a nation. Their ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the very source. They begin life trampling on all their younger brothers and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are taught and educated so to do. With what ideas of justice or honor can that man enter a house of legislation, who absorbs in his own person the inheritance of a whole family of children, or metes out some pitiful portion with the insolence of a gift?

Section III, "Of Civil Liberty"
Essay on the First Principles of Government, 2nd Edition (1771)

On due process, dissenting in In Re Winship, 397 U.S. 358 (1970).

Legislative Assembly, February 9, 1865
Context: This is a new land - a land of pretension because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the only true aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term. (Hear, hear.)

Letter to Jonathan Priestman (26 March 1848) on the Revolutions of 1848, quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 183.
1840s

Open letter to the Masters of Dublin (1913)