“‘My little friend . . . you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable; but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions.'”

—from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift