These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in eminent station.
Burke describes the unique and dangerous nature of tyranny exercised by those in power.
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When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.
Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our…
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