Edmund Burke: “I do, then, declare my conviction, and wish it may stand recorded to posterity, that there never was a bad man that had…”

This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction.

The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.

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.

Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?