Paine - The Rights of Man (1792) 

There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it.....Every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies...It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated...That which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to do...Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other, as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive.