Think of them, who dare menace in the way they do in their present state, what would they do if they had power commensurate to their malice.
Edmund Burke: “Think of them, who dare menace in the way they do in their present state, what would they do if they had power…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke warns against the dangers of those who threaten others when they lack power, suggesting their potential for malice if they gain it.
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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.
But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience.
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.
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.





