These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom.
Edmund Burke: “These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom.”
Editor's note · Context
Reflecting on the French Revolution, Burke distinguishes between the origins of institutions and their proper use.
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The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
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.
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.





