Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.
Edmund Burke: “Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.”
Editor's note · Context
Burke critiques the idea that military conflict is the best means to gain a people, suggesting a more thoughtful approach.
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They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they may see that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country.
Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…
Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.
Their trust for the future preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolutions.





