They have made no sacrifices to their projects of greater consequence than their shoe-buckles, whilst they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens, and bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of worthy men and worthy families.
From his critique of the French Revolution, Burke condemns the revolutionaries' lack of personal sacrifice compared to the suffering they inflicted.
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Their trust for the future preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolutions.
We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.
The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.
They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…
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