When I say, that we of the people ought to be informed, inclusively I say, we ought not to be flattered; flattery is the reverse of instruction.
Edmund Burke: “When I say, that we of the people ought to be informed, inclusively I say, we ought not to be flattered; flattery is the…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke emphasizes the importance of honest information over flattery for the public's understanding.
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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.
All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for…
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.





