Edmund Burke: “If the horror of the excesses of an absolute monarchy furnishes a reason for abolishing it, no monarchy once absolute…”

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.

It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance.

But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators.

Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly, and as it were by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness?