Edmund Burke: “A purposed neglect, or, what is worse, a literal, but perverse and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest…”

The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable.

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.

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.