Samuel Johnson, August 15, 1773, in Edinburgh, on the wisdom of committing oneself to a political party:
I CAN see that a man may do right to stick to a party; that is to say, he is a Whig, or he is a Tory, and he thinks one of those parties upon the whole the best, and that to make it prevail, it must be generally supported, though, in particulars, it may be wrong. He takes its faggot [bundle] of principles, in which there are fewer rotten sticks than in the other, though some rotten sticks to be sure; and they cannot well be separated. But, to bind one's self to one man, or one set of men (who may be right to-day and wrong to-morrow), without any general preference of system, I must disapprove.James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.
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