Historical voices

I know they set him up as a sort of oracle; because, with the best intentions in the world, he naturally philippizes, and chants his prophetic song in exact unison with their designs.

In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror.

Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.

The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous, in the most ridiculous modes, and apparently by the most contemptible instruments.

All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.

It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.

Whenever our neighbor's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power.

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.

I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one.

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it.

Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights?

Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the…

The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.

But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical…

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct.

Whatever I may have reason to suspect concerning private management, I shall speak of nothing as of a certainty but what is public.

This is one among the revolutions which have given splendor to obscurity and distinction to undiscerned merit.

The National Assembly of France has given importance to these gentlemen by adopting them; and they return the favor by acting as a committee in England for extending the principles of the National Assembly.

I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one in which the Constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution are held in high reverence; and I reckon myself among the most forward in my zeal for…

And when we view a flag, which to the eye is beautiful, and to contemplate its rise and origin inspires a sensation of sublime delight, our national honor must unite with our interest to prevent injury to the one, or insult to the other.