A nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom. But though history, experience and reasoning confirm these ideas; yet all-powerful delusion has been able to make the people of every nation lend a helping hand in putting on their own fetters and rivetting their own chains, and in this service delusion always employs men too great to speak the truth, and yet too powerful to be doubted. Their statements are believed – their projects adopted – their ends answered and the deluded subjects of all this artifice are left to passive obedience through life, and to entail a condition of unqualified non-resistance to a ruined posterity. [emphasis added] – Abraham Bishop.
Bishop was an American Jeffersonian politician (called "Republican" in that Era), abolitionist and orator, who lived 1763-1844. He apparently advocated for gender equality, too. Oddly, the wikithing lacks an article about Bishop, but I found this with some biographical information.
[daily log: walking, 7km]