Laudator Temporis Acti

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), speech to the Constitutional Convention (September 17, 1787), in Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution in the Convention Held at Philadelphia in 1787, ed. Jonathan Elliot (1888; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1974), p. 554:

[H]aving lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men, indeed, as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant, in a dedication, tells the Pope, that the only difference between our churches, in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines, is, 'the Church of Rome is infallible, and the Church of England is never in the wrong.' But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a dispute with her sister, said, 'I don't know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right — il n'y a que moi qui a toujours raison.'