Edmund Burke: “Their legislative and executive capacities were not so accurately drawn, and marked by such strong and penal lines of…”

Those who are servants in name, as well as in effect, do not like to be told of their situation, their duty, and their obligations.

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 conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…

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.