Stanley Elkins

“The state legislatures, as Madison and many another viewed them, had become a babel of narrow-minded parochial concerns, their members men of selfish interests and untutored understanding, oblivious of minority rights, passing unjust laws (such as legal tender acts whereby debts people owed each other could be paid in worthless currency), and all unchecked by any overriding vision of the public good or what it might consist of.”
― Stanley Elkins, The Age of Federalism

“Many old prisoners actually imitated the SS; they would sew and mend their uniforms in such a way as to make them look more like those of the SS—even though they risked punishment for it. “When asked why they did it, they admitted that they loved to look like . . . the guards.” Some took great enjoyment in the fact that during roll call “they really had stood well at”
― Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life