The Best Laid Plans....

All my life people have been coming to me with plans to make over society and its institutions. Many of these plans have seemed to me good. Some have been excellent. All of them have had one fatal defect. They have assumed that human nature would behave in a certain way. If it would behave in that way these plans would work, but if human nature would behave in that way these plans would not be necessary, for in that case society and its institutions would reform themselves.

~~~~~ Elihu Root (1845-1937)