“The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been ... important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.”
![“Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse.” quote by Jeane Kirkpatrick](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/4ed/jeane-kirkpatrick-12763_acquire_decades-if-not-centuries-are-normally-re_762756.jpg)
